Surviving Autocracy
(Sprache: Englisch)
From a bestselling, National Book Award-winning journalist, an essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times.
In the run-up to the 2016 election, Masha Gessen stood out from other journalists for the...
In the run-up to the 2016 election, Masha Gessen stood out from other journalists for the...
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From a bestselling, National Book Award-winning journalist, an essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times.In the run-up to the 2016 election, Masha Gessen stood out from other journalists for the ability to convey the ominous significance of Donald Trump's speech and behavior, unprecedented in a national candidate. Within forty-eight hours of his victory, the essay "Autocracy: Rules for Survival" had gone viral, and Gessen's coverage of his norm-smashing presidency became essential reading for a citizenry struggling to wrap their heads around the unimaginable. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Gessen has a sixth sense for signs of autocracy-and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate its emergence to Americans. This incisive book provides an indispensable overview of the calamitous trajectory of the past few years. Gessen not only highlights the corrosion of the media, the judiciary, and the cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years have changed us, from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages but also a beacon to recovery-or to enduring, and resisting, an ongoing assault.
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1.What Do We Call It?
It could have been any week of the Trump presidency-a week when he kept contradicting the government's experts on the COVID-19 pandemic, or a week when he was railing against Supreme Court justices, or a week when he humiliated his own cabinet members in public. Take one week in October 2019. It was a month into the impeachment inquiry in Congress and just over a thousand days into Donald Trump's presidency. The acting ambassador to Ukraine, William B. Taylor, Jr., testified about waging a losing battle against Trump and his people to pursue a foreign agenda consistent with government policy and practice. House Republicans stormed a closed impeachment-inquiry hearing in a bizarre direct action of Congress members against congressional practice. Trump's personal attorney William Consovoy argued in court that his client was immune from any prosecution-including, hypothetically, for murdering someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue-as long as he was president. And on Friday morning, The New York Times website had two headlines stacked on the left side of the home page. The top one reported that the Justice Department had launched a criminal probe into its own investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The headline directly below announced that the secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, had been found in contempt of court for continuing-in direct contravention of judicial decisions-to collect student-loan payments from former students of defunct for-profit colleges. The government seemed to be at war with itself on every front.
Trumpian news has a way of being shocking without being surprising. Every one of the events of that week was, in itself, staggering: an assault on the senses and the mental faculties. Together, they were just more of the same. Trump had beaten the government, the media, and the very concept of politics into a state beyond recognition. In
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part by habit and in part out of a sense of necessity, we continued to report the news and consume the news-this presidency produced more headlines per unit of time than any other-but at the end of each of his thousand days of presidency we seemed hardly closer to understanding what was happening to us.
The difficulty with absorbing the news lies, in part, in the words we use, which have a way of rendering the outrageous ordinary. The secretary of education was held in contempt, and this astounding event was narrated in normalizing newspaper prose: probably the strongest description called it an "exceedingly rare judicial rebuke of a Cabinet secretary." This could not begin to describe the drama of a cabinet member remaining unrepentant for her agency's seizure of assets from people whom it had been ordered by the courts to leave in peace-sixteen thousand people. And even when we could find the words to describe the exceptional, barely imaginable nature of Trumpian stories, that approach could not scale. How could we talk about a series of nearly inconceivable events that had become routine? How do we describe the confrontation of existing government institutions with a presidential apparatus that wants to destroy them?
I found some possible answers in the work of Hungarian sociologist B lint Magyar. In struggling to define and describe what had happened in his country, Magyar had realized that the language of both the media and the academy was not up to the task. After the Eastern Bloc collapsed in 1989, both local and Western commentators adopted the language of liberal democracy to describe what was happening in the region. They talked about elections and legitimacy, rule of law and public opinion. Their language reflected their assumptions and their limitations: they assumed that their countries would become liberal democracies-this seemed the inevitable outcome of the Cold War; and they had no other language at their disposal anyw
The difficulty with absorbing the news lies, in part, in the words we use, which have a way of rendering the outrageous ordinary. The secretary of education was held in contempt, and this astounding event was narrated in normalizing newspaper prose: probably the strongest description called it an "exceedingly rare judicial rebuke of a Cabinet secretary." This could not begin to describe the drama of a cabinet member remaining unrepentant for her agency's seizure of assets from people whom it had been ordered by the courts to leave in peace-sixteen thousand people. And even when we could find the words to describe the exceptional, barely imaginable nature of Trumpian stories, that approach could not scale. How could we talk about a series of nearly inconceivable events that had become routine? How do we describe the confrontation of existing government institutions with a presidential apparatus that wants to destroy them?
I found some possible answers in the work of Hungarian sociologist B lint Magyar. In struggling to define and describe what had happened in his country, Magyar had realized that the language of both the media and the academy was not up to the task. After the Eastern Bloc collapsed in 1989, both local and Western commentators adopted the language of liberal democracy to describe what was happening in the region. They talked about elections and legitimacy, rule of law and public opinion. Their language reflected their assumptions and their limitations: they assumed that their countries would become liberal democracies-this seemed the inevitable outcome of the Cold War; and they had no other language at their disposal anyw
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Autoren-Porträt von Masha Gessen
Masha Gessen is the author of eleven other books, including the National Book Award–winning The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. A staff writer at The New Yorker and the recipient of numerous awards, including Guggenheim and Carnegie fellowships, Gessen teaches at Bard College and lives in New York City.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Masha Gessen
- 2021, 304 Seiten, Masse: 12,7 x 20,1 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Riverhead Books
- ISBN-10: 0593332245
- ISBN-13: 9780593332245
- Erscheinungsdatum: 25.05.2021
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
Praise for Surviving Autocracy:When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen. The New York Times
The Platonic ideal of the anti-Trump Trump book. . . . Offers discomfort and reassurance at once. The Washington Post
An indispensable voice of and for this moment. Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny
Urgent . . . Gessen s credentials as an observer of autocracy are impeccable. . . . Surviving Autocracy sharpens an edge of disgust lately blunted by relentless use. The New York Review of Books
The fearless Russian American journalist probes the black hole between fact and fantasy in [a] taut, incisive critique. O, The Oprah Magazine
Gessen brings . . . a unique blend of intellect and manifold passions. . . [flashing] the fierce attitude and language of the partisan activist in one moment, returning to the cooler mien of a public intellectual the next. NPR
Brilliant. . . . [Gessen's] clarity is gemlike and refusal to equivocate precious. The Guardian (London)
A reckoning with what has been lost in the past few years and a map forward with our beliefs intact. Interview
Gessen s decades-long experience covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia puts them in a unique position to help Americans understand what is happening to the United States under President Donald Trump. . . . Gessen shows us that having the language to understand what is happening is the first step to surviving, and ultimately resisting, an autocratic future. The Nation
It s hard to imagine someone more poised to write a book called Surviving Autocracy than Masha Gessen. . . . It s a crucial book for our times. The New York Observer
Unfailingly polemical, precise and analytic. New Statesman (London)
A stark wake-up
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call; to those who are looking for what happens now, Gessen s notes on how we need to rebuild the concept of a we in our time are warm and moving, a light of hope that these years can be survived. Lit Hub
A blistering appraisal. . . . Surviving Autocracy isn t merely important reading for anyone who plans to cast a vote in that election, it s essential. Shelf Awareness
A brisk, trenchant account . . . . Gessen s meticulous research and familiarity with the political and cultural history of post-Soviet Russia lend her arguments an authority lacking in other takedowns of Trump. Liberals looking to make sense of what they re up against in the 2020 elections should consider this a must-read. Publishers Weekly (starred review)
A handbook for an age in which egomania is morphing into autocracy at warp speed. . . . Belongs on the shelf alongside Timothy Snyder s On Tyranny and Amy Siskind s The List as a record of how far we have fallen. Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Gessen s is a clarion voice in the darkness, offering a sobering but sharp-witted analysis of how American society has changed under Trump. . . . [their] rallying cry is a vital and pressing reminder of what's at stake. Booklist (starred review)
A blistering appraisal. . . . Surviving Autocracy isn t merely important reading for anyone who plans to cast a vote in that election, it s essential. Shelf Awareness
A brisk, trenchant account . . . . Gessen s meticulous research and familiarity with the political and cultural history of post-Soviet Russia lend her arguments an authority lacking in other takedowns of Trump. Liberals looking to make sense of what they re up against in the 2020 elections should consider this a must-read. Publishers Weekly (starred review)
A handbook for an age in which egomania is morphing into autocracy at warp speed. . . . Belongs on the shelf alongside Timothy Snyder s On Tyranny and Amy Siskind s The List as a record of how far we have fallen. Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Gessen s is a clarion voice in the darkness, offering a sobering but sharp-witted analysis of how American society has changed under Trump. . . . [their] rallying cry is a vital and pressing reminder of what's at stake. Booklist (starred review)
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