Autocracy Is in the Details

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To a casual observer, Donald Trump’s claim about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs seemed like a bizarre or mistaken claim that ultimately fueled millions of memes, jokes, and racist insults. But to someone who knows what to look for, the story he told read as much more calculated and familiar. Making an outrageous claim is one common tactic of an autocrat. So is sticking to it far beyond the time when it’s even remotely believable. Autocrats often dare their followers to believe absurd claims, as a kind of loyalty test, because “humor and fear can be quite close together sometimes,” says Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born British journalist and co-host of Autocracy in America, an Atlantic podcast series.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to Pomerantsev and Atlantic staff writer and co-host Anne Applebaum about how to detect the signs of autocracy, because, as they say, if you can’t spot them, you won’t be able to root them out. We also analyze the events of the upcoming election through their eyes and talk about how large swaths of a population come to believe lies, what that means, and how it might be undone.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. There’s something new unfolding in this election, something we haven’t seen in this country on such a grand scale. Kamala Harris said it bluntly at her acceptance speech at the DNC when she talked about how tyrants like Kim Jong Un side with Donald Trump.

Rosin: An autocrat. How do you know if a leader is vying to be an autocrat? It’s an abstract title hard to picture playing out in the U.S. But as I picked up in a new Atlantic podcast, Autocracy in America, if you know what you’re looking for, you can see it pretty clearly.

People who have seen it play out in other countries can tick through the list of autocratic tactics. At work. Right now. In the United States.

Rosin: This is staff writer Anne Applebaum. She’s a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and co-host of Autocracy in America.

Her co-host is Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and a scholar of propaganda and misinformation.

Here’s my conversation with Anne and Peter.

[Music]

Rosin: So I think of the two of you as, like, detectives. You see patterns happening in the news and the election that the rest of us either don’t notice or don’t quite put together as patterns. So I want to, through your eyes, look at the current election. Have you detected any patterns or signs of the kind of current autocracy in America bubble up in the dialogue of this election?

Applebaum: So I was very struck by the famous “eating cats and dogs” phrase.

Applebaum: And everybody laughed at it, and they said, Ha ha ha. That’s very funny. And this struck me as an example of people lying in a way, even though everybody knows they’re lying, and the purpose of the lie was to demonstrate their power. We can lie. We can do whatever we want. We can say whatever we want about these people, and it doesn’t affect us.

And the fact that they never retracted it, despite the fact that people in Springfield were up in arms, and everybody who’s done any reporting—journalists have been to Springfield, have asked people, Are there any dogs or cats being eaten? And people say no.

It’s a way of showing power—so, We can lie, and everybody else is going to go along with our lie when we win the election.

Pomerantsev: You know, something that’s been much remarked upon in autocratic systems: truth and power sort of switch roles. You know, we think of truth challenging power and holding the powerful by account with the truth. When I lived in Russia—and my first book, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, was all about this, how truth didn’t play that role anymore. Truth was about showing your loyalty, showing whose side you’re on—and, you know, subservient to power.

Applebaum: They’re creating around themselves a kind of alternative community, where, If you’re inside our world, we say whatever we want the truth to be, and everybody joins in.

Pomerantsev: And also, rubbishing the idea of truth. I mean, what comes with that is truth stops being about information and analysis. It’s about making a point, saying whose side you’re on. Even the more absurd the lie that you say shows even more, Look at my team. Look at my team. Look whose side I’m on.

And Vance was fascinating. You know, he’s a very fascinating character, something right out of some of the darkest Russian novels, because he kind of intellectualizes this, because he’s also a writer and someone who thinks about language a lot, clearly. And when he went on air and said, Oh yeah. I made this up, and I’ll keep on making things up. Because truth doesn’t matter. You know, something else matters.

Rosin: And is it just because I’m (A) an American and (B) a journalist that I can’t catch up? Like, you both have so much foreign experience—living in foreign countries, watching autocracy—so you’ve digested this. Is it because it’s new to me that everything—like, every time Trump does it, I keep wishing for the facts to stop the momentum, and they never do, and somehow I can’t catch up? It’s just because we’re new, right? Because Americans just haven’t seen this before.

Applebaum: It’s not that new. I mean, it’s been going on since 2016. And in fact, I would say almost the opposite is true. I think most people—I mean, you may be an exception.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Pomerantsev: It’s because you’re a journalist, not because you’re an American.

Rosin: (Laughs.) It’s because I’m slow.

Applebaum: No. I think most people have got used to it. And I mean, the normalization of the lying and the normalization of the gibberish that Trump comes up with—all of that has become part of the background of politics in America and isn’t shocking the way it would have been. And imagine an election 20 years ago. I don’t know—imagine Bill Clinton going up on the stage and talking about sharks and electrocution and Hannibal Lecter. People would have been outraged, and he would have been thrown off the stage, and Who is this crazy person talking to us?

But we’ve now gone down a path where we’re accustomed to that way of speaking in public. More and more people have joined the former president in doing so. More and more people have got used to listening to that, and we’re in a different world now. Maybe you’re just still in the former world.

Rosin: But why are we laughing? I mean, what you’re saying is quite serious. Like, what you’re saying is that they’re using this pet story in order to sort of flex a kind of autocratic power, and we are just making memes and making jokes and laughing at Trump and saying how ridiculous it is that he’s doing this pet thing. But what you’re talking about is quite serious. So that’s where I’m saying maybe the gap is—like, we haven’t quite caught up—that actually it’s dangerous. It’s not funny.

Pomerantsev: I don’t find it funny at all, actually. I find it very, very sinister. One thing that we keep on coming back to in our show is in Eastern Europe, where there’s been a history of this, the response is often to look at the absurdity of it. A lot of the great Eastern European novels about autocracy are absurdist novels. But absurdism is very scary. I mean, in the hands of the sadistic and the powerful, it’s a terrifying tool. So I find humor and fear can be quite close together sometimes.

Applebaum: No. It’s one of the things you do when you’re afraid and also, especially, when you’re powerless. When democracy has failed completely, when you’re living in a completely autocratic society, then what do you have left? You can’t fight back. You can’t hit anybody. So you turn it into jokes.

Rosin: So that’s the level of Trump. I want to talk about this at the level of followers or people listening to Trump or, you know, the general populace, and tell you guys a story.

I’ve been to more Trump rallies in this election than I have in the last election. And one thing that happens is: I was reporting with an Atlantic reporter. His name is John Hendrickson. He covers politics, and he has a pronounced stutter. And this was at the time that Biden was still running, and Trump had declined to make fun of Biden’s stutter, and then Trump crossed that line in a certain rally. He started to make fun of the way Biden talks.

Rosin: And John Hendrickson wanted to go with me to a rally. So we thought we would get into some sticky ethical dilemmas, and we would have kind of difficult conversations with people about compassion and morality. And we did have some of that. But a lot of what happened is that people would say to us, That didn’t happen. Trump didn’t do that. Like, I just, again, wasn’t prepared for that.

[Music]

Rosin: The first time someone said it, I just said, Yes. He did, like a baby. And they said, Well, no. We don’t know—he didn’t, and so then I sort of stepped back and called up the video. And then there was a video of Trump doing what we said he had done. So then the next time someone said he didn’t do that, I just showed them the video, and they said, Well, we don’t—I don’t know where that video came from. I don’t know that that’s real.

And so I didn’t know what to do next. Like, when people just say, That didn’t happen, I just wasn’t sure where to go next. So what I did was go home and Google the term psychological infrastructure. And I don’t even know if that’s a thing, but just what has happened to our brains? And I wanted you two to reflect on this.

Applebaum: I mean, one of the things that happened to our brains—and I don’t think it’s only Trump supporters—is that the quantity of information that we all see every day is so enormous. And so much of it is either false or irrelevant, or somehow we learn to exclude it, that I think the old, slow process of thinking about what’s true and what’s not true—it’s hardly even relevant anymore. It’s not just Americans, actually. I mean, I think everybody has started to treat facts and evidence and truth differently. And I think that’s kind of where Trump comes from.

In the way that Hollywood produced Ronald Reagan and TV produced JFK, because they were the new forms of media, and they were the ones who were successful in that media, I think Trump is somebody who’s successful in the world of very fast video clips and takes, where you’re not paying any attention anymore to what’s actually true and what’s not, and what’s AI and what’s not, and what’s staged and what’s not. I think he’s just a beneficiary of that.

Pomerantsev: I always wonder: What is the permission structure that a leader gives their followers, especially when the leader has this really tight emotional bond with their followers?

The permission structure that Trump gives his audience, I think, is: He sticks a middle finger up to reality. It’s very nice to give a middle finger to reality. Reality, essentially, at the end of the day, reminds you of death. I mean, it’s a middle finger to death at some very deep level. That’s what Trump gives people. So he denies reality, so you can deny reality, so when Hanna turns up with her evidence, you can go, Eh, fuck that.

Rosin: Oh my God. That—

Pomerantsev: And that gives you a high.

Rosin: Peter, that’s so—I mean, that feels correct, because there is such a hostility towards the media in a Trump rally. And it is very fun for people in a Trump rally, because often the media has the power. Like, I have equipment. I have a microphone. I have a lot of things. It is such a high for people to give us the middle finger and just say, like, You have no power. You’re nothing. That is very much in that dynamic. So I wonder if there is just some pleasure in telling us that didn’t happen. And it doesn’t matter if you knew it happened or saw it happen or anything like that.

Pomerantsev: We know about the hostility to the media as a kind of, like, sociological strategy, but also, I wonder, actually, it’s deeper than that. By telling the people who represent knowledge and facts a big middle finger, it’s part of this bigger rebellion against reality.

Applebaum: You know, Trump, from the very beginning of his political career—one of the central things he was doing was attacking the idea of truth. Remember how he broke into our consciousness in the political world as a birther. You know, Barack Obama is not really the president. He’s an illegitimate president. He was born in Kenya.

Applebaum: And the fact that he could build a community of trust around that idea was a beginning, for a lot of people, of a break with, as you say, the idea that facts are real and that there’s some structure of truth, fact-finding, journalism, etcetera that can back it up.

So I think this has been a deliberate thing that he’s done for a decade, is to try to undermine people’s faith in truth and faith in journalism and faith in all kinds of other institutions, as well. But he is aided by the nature of the modern conversation and debate, which has only become more chaotic, you know, with every passing year.

Rosin: Do you two think of the American mind as broken in some way? No. I’m serious. Like, where we journalists are playing a losing game, and the American mind is corroded?

Applebaum: I’m not sure it’s just the American mind.

Pomerantsev: That was a very diplomatic answer, Anne. Damn, that was good. That was good.

Rosin: I actually wonder about this. I actually wonder about this. I mean, that is a very unmelodic phrase I Googled, psychological infrastructure. But I did start to think of the world in this way. Like, Okay, there’s a transportation infrastructure. There are all these, you know—but then there’s a collective-consciousness infrastructure, and it’s being corrupted, you know. In the same way you can sort of hack into an electrical grid, you can hack into a collective consciousness. And it just seems terrifying to me.

Applebaum: It matters a lot who the leaders of your country are. I remember an Italian friend of mine telling me a long time ago, after Berlusconi had been the leader of Italy for a number of years, it actually changed the way men and women related to each other in the country, because Berlusconi was famous for having lots of young girlfriends and so on.

Suddenly, it became okay for married men to have much younger girlfriends, in a way that it hadn’t been before. So he kind of changed the morality because he was the top dog, so whatever he did was okay. And that suddenly meant it was okay for a lot of other people too. And I think Trump did something like that too.

He made lying okay. You know, If Trump does it, and he’s the president—or he was the president—then it’s okay for anyone to do it. We can all do it. And so I do think he had an impact on the national psyche, or whatever term you want to use.

Pomerantsev: Yeah. I think the question isn’t whether it’s broken or not. Clearly, something has snapped if 30 percent of the country think the last election rigged in some way.

So the question, Is it broken irrevocably? is actually the question. And the only thing I would say from seeing this in authoritarian regimes or regimes that go authoritarian-ish: It’s very shocking when you see people openly choosing to live in an alternative reality. It’s not that they got duped. They’re doing that because it’s part of their new identity.

It can also be thin because it is a bad identity. And actually, in their personal lives, they’re still completely rational. You know, they need facts as soon as they’re looking at their bank account. So it’s not all pervasive. This is just something you do for your political identity, for the theater of it, which means that it can change very fast, again, and change back again. So there is a thinness to it.

Rosin: But that’s hopeful.

Pomerantsev: That’s what I mean. That’s what I mean. So is it irrevocable? Not necessarily, is what I would say. But clearly something’s broken.

Rosin: After the break, Anne and Peter play out our near future—that is, what happens after the election—and Anne tries her hardest not to sound too dark.

[Break]

Rosin: Okay. So broaden out a little bit. What’s at stake in the election, as you two see it? This election.

Applebaum: I have to be careful not to sound apocalyptic, because it’s kind of my trademark tone, and I’m seeking to—

Rosin: It’s your brand. You’re trying to change your brand. (Laughs.)

Applebaum: I’m trying to tone it down. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Okay.

Pomerantsev: Just as things get really apocalyptic, Anne’s like, I’m going to be all self-helpy. (Laughs.)

Applebaum: I think whether the United States continues to be a democracy in the way that we’ve known it up until now—or at least since the Civil War or maybe since the civil-rights movement—is at stake.

I think, for example, the question of whether we will go on having, you know, a Justice Department that adheres to the rule of law and government institutions who act in the interests of the American people—rather than the interest of the president, personally, and his friends, personally—I think all of that’s at stake.

So the thing that I’ve seen happen in other countries is the politicization of the state and the politicization of institutions. And that’s what I think is very, very likely to happen if Trump wins a second term. And once that begins, it is very hard to reverse. It’s very hard to bring back the old civil servants who are, for better or for worse—I mean, maybe they’re ineffective or incompetent, but at least they think they’re acting in the interests of Americans.

Once you don’t have that culture anymore, it’s difficult to rebuild, and I’m afraid of that.

Pomerantsev: Look—America’s meaning in the world goes beyond its borders. It is the only superpower that’s also a democracy and talks a lot about freedom, though we unpack what it means by “freedom” in the show. There’s a real risk that a Trump victory is the end of America’s role doing that. For me, actually, the most sinister moment in the debates was when Trump looked to Viktor Orbán, the leader of Hungary, as his role model.

Orbán is not of great importance geopolitically. Hungary is a tiny country, but he’s a model for a new type of authoritarian-ish regimes inside Europe. And if America cuts off its alliances, if America makes possible a world where Russia and China will dominate—and there’s a real risk of that—then we’re into a very, very, very dangerous and turbulent future.

This is a moment when democracies really do hang together. The other side is very focused and very ruthless. Something that didn’t make it into the show was a quote from an interview that we did with Mikhail Zygar, the Russian journalist. He’s in Episode 2. But there was one line that didn’t make it into the show for editing reasons. But he sort of told us: What do the Kremlin elite call Trump?

And they call him Gorbachev, America’s Gorbachev, by which they don’t mean he’s a liberal reformer. They mean he’s going to bring the whole thing crashing down. It’s the end of America, and it’s Russia and China’s moment to dominate.

Applebaum: Yeah. And not just the end of America as a democracy but the end of American leadership in the world, the way that Gorbachev ended—

Pomerantsev: The project’s over.

Applebaum: The project’s over. That’s what they think.

Pomerantsev: Oh, they’re licking their lips.

Rosin: Let’s say Trump doesn’t win. Do all your worries fade away?

Applebaum: Some do. I mean, not having Trump as the leader—having him having been defeated in an election, especially if that election result holds and there is not another rebellion—that will force at least some part of the Republican Party to try to move on and find different language and different leaders.

But there will be a long legacy, even if he loses—so the legacy of people who’ve come to accept his way of speaking and his way of dealing with the world as normal, the legacy of people who believe that Kamala Harris is a Marxist revolutionary who’s out to destroy America, the legacy of violence in politics and the language of violence in politics. I mean, we’ve always had it, actually, in U.S. history. You can find lots of moments where it’s there, kind of rises and falls depending on the times. But we have a continued high level of threat, I think.

Rosin: Right. So it still requires a vigilance. It’s clear from this conversation why you two were motivated to make this series, Autocracy in America. Why does going back in history and doing this broad sweep—why is that useful? Why approach it in that way?

Pomerantsev: America is incredibly exceptional. But also, the things that play out here, you know, they have their precedence internationally and in history. And sometimes stepping back from the immediate moment is the way to sort of both understand it and also start to deal with it. You know, sometimes when you’re just in this—you know, the latest rage tweet or the latest, like, horrific TikTok video or something—stepping back, seeing the context, seeing the larger roots, seeing that it happens elsewhere is a way of then starting to deal with it.

I mean, that’s what a therapist will always get you to do. He says, Step back from the crisis, and let’s talk about the context. And the context is both uplifting in the sense that there have been ways to deal with this before but also—I mean, for me it was fascinating to understand how the story of autocracy in America is not just about Trump at all.

It’s a stable thing that’s been there all the time. The series, for me, was transformative in the sense that—I entered it, and I’m still in the process of making sense of it—I entered it very much with this idea that the story of America is the story of America outgrowing its lacks of freedoms and rights and getting better and better.

And by the end, I was kind of inching towards a revisioning, where it seems a country where the autocratic instincts and the democratic instincts are constantly competing, constantly at war with each other, and mitigated by things like foreign-policy. I mean, you know, Episode 4 is all about how America’s foreign policy choices in the Cold War, being for freedom, made it improve civil rights at home.

So all these factors influence the progress of democracy, the upholding of rights and freedoms. And it’s not some simple line. And that, for me, was actually quite—I don’t know. That was very new for me.

Applebaum: I think it’s also important that people stop thinking about history the way I was, essentially, taught in school, which is that it’s some kind of line of progress.

You know, The arc of history bends towards justice, or whatever way you want to put it—that we’re on some kind of upward trajectory, you know, and that sometimes we back down but, Never mind. It’ll keep going, because history isn’t determinative like that. It’s, in fact, circular. Things happen. We grow out of them. But then they come back. You know, ideas return. Old ways of doing and thinking—they don’t get banished forever. They reemerge.

And when you look at American history, just like when you look at the history of any country, actually, you find that. You find that old ideas come back, and I thought it was worth it, in this series, since we were talking about the present and the future, to also look at the way some of the same ideas and arguments had played out in the past.

Rosin: Well, Anne, Peter, thank you so much for making this series and for talking to us about it today.

Applebaum: Thank you.

Pomerantsev: Thank you for listening.

Rosin: Listeners, I urge you to check out the whole series, Autocracy in America. You’ll learn to spot the signs of autocracy in our past and right now. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.