Is the U.S. headed for autocracy?
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M. Gessen knows what it feels like when a democracy starts to look like something else. They lived in Russia in the aughts in early 2010s, which was a period of time when Vladimir Putin steadily cracked down on activists, journalists, and opposition leaders.

And one of the particularities of Russia, according to Gessen, is that before things became threatening, they often just seemed ridiculous. It seemed completely absurd when Putin started centering LGBT people as the root of all evil and a threat to Russian sovereignty.

Tiny minority, not that visible in Russia. Guessing as trans and non-binary. But they say they failed to take Putin's words seriously at first. You know, I thought it was almost quaint. And I certainly didn't realize that it was a personal threat and that within a couple of years I'd have to flee the country.

Guessing left Russia in 2013. They're in the U.S. now, a columnist for the New York Times. In a recent op-ed, they argued that the phenomenon, outlandish ideas taken seriously, it feels a lot like what has happened in the first month of the Trump administration. We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong opinions and ideas, and I think we'll probably state those opinions now. Like that press conference where President Trump argued that diversity policies were

or behind that plane crash at the Washington airport. It's all under investigation. I understand that. That's why I'm trying to figure out how you can come to the conclusion right now that diversity had something to do with this crash. Because I have common sense, okay? And unfortunately, a lot of people don't. Trump has also repeatedly raised the idea that the U.S. will make Canada its 51st state. Some people say that would be a long shot.

If people wanted to play the game right, it would be 100% certain that they'd become a state. And then there's that proposal for the U.S. to, quote, own the Gaza Strip, permanently relocate the Palestinians who live there and redevelop it. I don't want to be cute. I don't want to be a wise guy. But the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so bad. This could be so magnificent.

Consider this. Trump's term has been marked by a string of policy proposals that would have been unthinkable in any other administration. Even if they don't go anywhere, they are reshaping the boundaries of our democracy. From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow.

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It's Consider This from NPR. M. Gessen argues that there's a simple through line to the barrage of proposals in President Trump's first month. Bad ideas as such actually do a lot of the work of building autocracy. Gessen has thought and written a lot about autocracy, most recently as an opinion columnist on the New York Times.

So I got them on the line to talk about how they make sense of the Trump administration so far. You know, we imagine autocracy as extreme repression, as the usurpation of power, and all of that is true. And for some people, living under autocracy is terrifying because they're direct political targets. But for most people, from my experience, or most of the time, living under autocracy is just dumb.

We are engaged now with things like, should the United States buy Greenland? Did DI cause the plane and helicopter collision? These are absurd propositions and yet intelligent people start asking stupid questions like, can the United States take over Gaza and redevelop it as a seaside resort? The idea that people have obligations to one another

that there's a law-based world order, at least we aspire to having one. All of this is being delegitimized with these bad ideas. I want to do...

The radio host thing here of pushing back on the idea I've invited you onto this program to talk about, but I'm very curious about how you think about this because Americans voted to return Trump to power. And there's a lot of anecdotal and broader evidence that a lot of voters hear conversations like the one that we're having right now as white noise. This is alarmist worries from elites and magazines and national news outlets. And they either don't believe these warnings or they don't care. How do you think about this?

How have you thought about this since the election? And what do you think about that dynamic that seems to really be playing out? You know, a couple of things. One is that I think that Americans voted for Donald Trump because there are some really major problems with the system of government as it's constituted.

And I think that basically the Democratic Party for at least three election cycles has now insisted that things are fine just the way they are, that we just have to live in some sort of imaginary normal, really refusing to hear that the normal, whatever that is, isn't working for a lot of people, that they are anxious and miserable people.

And they would rather throw a grenade at the way things are in the form of Donald Trump than continue living the way they've been living. And the reason it's important to think about that now is that it's still the same sort of dynamic where Trump is taking a sledgehammer to the world as we've known it. And the Democrats are saying, well, you can't do that. That's not how the rules are written.

Americans have said that the way that the rules are written and the way that the system functions doesn't work for them. So there has to be a bigger idea. The rules were written for a reason. They were there to perform certain functions. They were there to make sure that our obligations to one another are in fact fulfilled. And they haven't been.

I think a theme across all of the close analysis of what has happened to countries that have slid into authoritarianism in the past is that a lot of the times the power is willingly given over. And when you look across the country right now, whether it's large corporate-owned media settling lawsuits or big corporations suddenly changing their policies and their political actions or nonprofits stripping words from their websites right now,

What do you think is so different from the first time Trump has office to right now that statements he made the first time around kind of went in and out of a lot of these actors' ears? And this time they are stopping what they are doing. They are recalculating. They are making changes to be on the right side of Donald Trump policies. I think that these decisions are rational, each one of them taken separately.

And they are rational, even if you contrast them to Trump's first term. The threat wasn't as real. I think that whoever makes these decisions at businesses or at nonprofits or at universities, eight years ago, thought quite reasonably that Trump was an anomalous political event in this country's history. With Trump's second election, we can no longer claim that this is what this country is. And I think that rationally,

People are settling in for the long haul and making decisions about their organizations that will benefit them or at least keep them safer in the short term. And that's really the problem with this kind of abeyance is that it is reasonable, it is well thought through, and it is sometimes even values-based. People are thinking, I'm protecting my employees. I'm protecting my organization. The problem is that when everyone does that,

That is exactly how autocracy is built. It cannot be built without people's cooperation. You know, in many different ways, though, all presidents push for and grab power, right? I'm thinking of one of the examples that we've seen in the last few weeks, Trump's takeover of the Kennedy Center board, appointing himself chair of the board. A lot of other examples to pick from, but I'm going with that one because the Kennedy Center put out a statement that said, this is a little bit of a paraphrase, but they said,

Presidents have always had the power to change our board. They just haven't exercised it. So if Trump had that power and chose to use that, again, isn't that the push and pull of democracy? That is the push and pull of democracy, or rather it's the push of democracy. And if all that is exercised is the push and there is no real political opposition by political opposition, I don't just mean casting votes, although that would really help.

if Democrats were a little bit less willing to confirm Trump's nominees for cabinet posts. But if there's no real politics coming from the other side, then we will watch democracy destroy itself, which is one of its fundamental design flaws. We've always known that.

M. Gessen is an opinion columnist at The New York Times and the author of The Future is History, How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Thanks so much for talking to us. Thank you for having me. This episode was produced by Mia Venkat and Conor Donovan. It was edited by Courtney Darning and Nadia Lancey. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.

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