The Age of Apathy
5 min read
Shortly after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, a raft of self-help books and articles appeared, written by students of post-Soviet society. Drawing on lessons gleaned from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, these authors sought to supply Americans with a manual for thwarting Trumpism. In The New York Review of Books, Masha Gessen published an essay titled “Autocracy: Rules for Survival.” The Yale historian Timothy Snyder churned out a best-selling pamphlet, On Tyranny, a step-by-step guide to resistance.
The core lesson these writers hoped to impart was the necessity of sustained outrage. “It is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock,” Gessen instructed. Without outrage, they warned, apathy would set in. And once that happened, autocracy would seem as natural as the forest.
Those warnings were stirring, and they helped propel a spirit of loud, uncompromising opposition to Trump. Those who embraced this style, and their critics who facetiously mocked it, began referring to the “Resistance.” Although the Resistance harbored grifters and occasionally flirted with conspiracy theories, it also worked at the time. Pressure from the Resistance bolstered institutions, especially segments of the media and the Democratic Party, that might have plausibly buckled as Trump attempted to impose his will. And it supplied the electoral energy that helped the Democrats win at the ballot box in 2018 and 2020.
In the closing weeks of this election, I can’t help but recall the very different mood that prevailed four years ago. Back then, many journalists acted as if the prospect of a second Trump term was a national emergency, necessitating unrelenting negative coverage of the incumbent. Voting was portrayed as an act of heroism, because of the raging pandemic. Even if Joe Biden provoked little affection, his campaign felt to his supporters like the culmination of a liberation movement.
On the cusp of Trump’s potential return to power, the Resistance now feels like a relic of another era. The sense of outrage, which carried Biden to victory, is not what it once was. Pollsters privately suspect that this election will have lower turnout than the last. Organizers canvassing for Vice President Kamala Harris say that they encounter widespread indifference among progressive voters, especially the young. Segments of the elite that once proudly opposed Trump have made peace with him.
At a certain point, some humans, even the richest and most powerful, simply give up. The most graphic illustration of this is Jeff Bezos. In the years after he bought The Washington Post, the Amazon founder seemed to bathe in the praise that his paper received for its coverage of Trump. He paid for glossy Super Bowl ads, blaring the paper’s new motto, “Democracy dies in darkness.” By financing journalistic resistance to Trump, he whitewashed his own growing reputation as a rapacious monopolist. He became a darling of the Washington elite and a heroic figure in some journalistic circles. But he also suffered Trump’s lashings and retaliatory threats against his business.
Two presidential elections later, Bezos has made a different choice. Last week, he vetoed a Post editorial endorsing Harris, just before its publication. After 11 years of owning the paper, he broke with tradition and suddenly decided that the Post should no longer put its weight behind a presidential candidate. He later supplied a high-minded justification for his meddling, which mostly blamed journalists rather than autocrats for widespread mistrust of the media, but it wasn’t hard to interpret the psychology at play. In his mind, and for the sake of his balance sheet, resistance is no longer worth it.
Outrage is a transient emotional state, almost impossible to sustain over the years, because it’s so draining, both physically and emotionally. (Gessen and Snyder warned about that, too.) And Trump has a special talent for provoking exhaustion, because he’s such an all-consuming figure, with a unique ability to spike his critics’ blood pressure and populate their nightmares.
Another reason outrage has faded is that Biden won the last election. He campaigned on the promise of returning the nation to normal, and so the establishment reset itself to neutral. The belief that the nation had escaped Trump gained purchase in much of traditional media, especially after the January 6 attack. The Trump era resulted in a break from the profession’s norms; it demanded an uncharacteristic spirit of partisanship and emotionalism. But with Biden’s arrival in the White House, a broad swath of media attempted to restore its impartiality, to reclaim whatever authority it might have sacrificed in its combat with Trump.
Having reverted back to their old ways, many outlets were somehow caught unprepared for Donald Trump’s return. They have been painfully slow to describe the even more autocratic version of the man who has emerged in this campaign, who is running on far more explicit pronouncements of his authoritarian intentions. It’s hard to quantify the tilt of news coverage—and easy to overstate its influence. But there’s a pet phrase that recurs in news stories that captures the inability to grasp the danger: The press likes to describe Trump’s “old grievances,” which implies that he’s merely playing back his greatest hits, more of the same old anger. But that downplays the novelty of Trump’s promise to unleash the military on “enemies within.” Or the fact that, as my colleague Anne Applebaum has noted, his rhetoric has come to resemble that of Hitler and Mussolini. On the merits, this warning should crowd out every other story in the campaign.
Hardly a sector of society is immune from the onset of apathy. It exists within the business elite, embodied by Jamie Dimon and Bill Gates, who can’t be bothered to publicly announce their private opposition to Trump, perhaps because it might somehow cost them. It exists within the segment of the left that has decadently announced that it can’t stomach voting for Harris because she hasn’t been sufficiently outraged by the war in Gaza, as if democracy at home wasn’t hanging in the balance.
I’ll admit, shamefacedly, that I feel a measure of apathy myself. The prospect of a second Trump term is a nightmare that I’d rather not ponder, a fear that I’d rather repress. If I didn’t have a professional obligation to obsess over this election, I would be hiding in escapist entertainment. But that would just be a less destructive version of Bezos’s selfishness.
In this final stretch of the campaign, there are glimmers of outrage. According to NPR, 200,000 Washington Post readers have canceled their subscriptions to protest Bezos’s decision. In the long run, that boycott might self-destructively imperil an essential institution. In the short run, it’s evidence that a meaningful portion of the electorate is unwilling to sleepwalk into a second Trump term, a hopeful indication that the cloud of apathy might, however belatedly, be lifting.
