The Authoritarian Turn

The red flags go beyond January 6.

Remember the avalanche of stories following Trump’s election prophesying the coming of authoritarianism? There was Masha Gessen parlaying their¹ career covering Vladmir Putin into becoming the nation’s self-help coach on how to “survive” an “autocracy” (in which they reference “the unlikely event that some mainstream media outlets decide to declare themselves in opposition to the current government” — LOL). Gessen has since made that article into a book, because of course they have. There was Sarah Kendzior’s endless scroll of doom, also, now, available in book form. There was Stephen Walt’s listicle on how to tell “if your President is a dictator.” There was Vox’s blockbuster explainer on “the rise of American authoritarianism” that was so long it had a Table of Contents. There’s every word Jason Stanley has uttered, basically, since 2016. And on and on and on.

Somehow we managed to get through the Trump presidency without a state takeover of the media, prisons full of political prisoners, and the incumbent winning the following election with 99.82 percent of the vote with 107 percent turnout. We have a new President from the opposing party, and the opposition in control of the House.

Apparently, though, we’re not out of the woods just yet. According to journalist Barton Gellman, “Trump’s next coup has already begun;” we just haven’t been paying close enough attention. Biden hasn’t been in office for even a year, but if Gellman’s Atlantic article is a harbinger, we’re already on the cusp of a whole new cycle of media hyperventilation about imminent Trump tyranny that should carry us through the midterms, all the way to the 2024 elections.

Gellman’s argument is equal parts wonky and goofy. It’s not really worth the trouble of summarizing. As is typical of this genre, most of it consists of warning of Trump’s army of fanatics, who are willing to subordinate any law or principle to the objective of putting their champion back into office. We’ve been hearing about these menacing characters, the so-called “insurrectionists,” non-stop for almost a year. But in Gellman’s imagination they achieve new proportions: They’re “armed and single-minded;” they “embrace violence, and reject democratic defeat.” Because of their challenge, in 2024, “democracy will be on trial.”

“There is a clear and present danger,” Gellman warns, “that American democracy will not withstand the destructive forces that are now converging upon it.”

No doubt there are anti-democratic forces on the right. But to reduce the drift toward authoritarianism in the United States to a strain of right-wing politics is to overlook what’s happening all over Blue State America. Gellman lives in New York, where the Mayor just imposed a vaccine requirement on every business in the city, and is forcing kids as young as five to show vaccine passports to enter public indoor spaces. It’s a little strange to read 14,000 words about the looming threat of authoritarianism from an entirely hypothetical Republican conspiracy led by an out-of-office politician while every week, Democratic mayors and governors are promulgating intrusive new rules by fiat.

Maybe Covid is too far afield from what Gellman is focused on, though, which is Americans who are prepared to resort to violence against other Americans to force their political wills on the country — in other words, domestic terrorism. But that also describes what we saw last summer in cities around the country, where protestors committed acts of violence to pursue their agenda of defunding the police. That, too, gets no mention from Gellman.

The current drift toward authoritarianism in the United States is not, in fact, the exclusive province of any particular political camp. Neither “the left” nor “the right” owns it; it encompasses both. Nascent authoritarianism in the United States is a social condition, not a political project. It isn’t even an affirmative movement toward some political destination called “authoritarianism,” as fascism and communism were in the twentieth century. Rather, it’s just what we’re left with as democracy decays around us.

As social media has replaced IRL community as our primary domain of socialization, and civil society as our primary mode of public debate and organization, as our opinions and our emotions have come to be shaped by its incentives and algorithms, we have become sorted into tribes, each with not only our own loyalties and leaders, but with our own bespoke realities. There’s nothing novel about that observation; it’s been obvious for years. But somehow its political implications are still misunderstood.

The echo chambers we inhabit on both the left and the right are so homogeneous that we’re rarely exposed to substantive disagreement, and so we’re almost never confronted with the best arguments from the other side; all we see is ridiculous caricatures of them. When we do encounter a difference of opinion, it’s usually from someone even further to the extreme, urging us to take a yet more hardline position. In these silos the political opposition ceases to be actual human beings, who you can talk to and work alongside and watch a ball game with. They become abstractions — a malevolent and insidious power that infects and transforms people, like the Dark Side of the Force. Tribalism has transformed our perceptions of our political opponents from adversaries to an enemy horde, turning every disagreement into a grand existential battle instead of a thorny problem to be solved.

Take vaccine mandates. There are a number of basic, empirical questions that one could reasonably expect to guide our thinking on whether or not to require vaccines for employment and participation in public life. Among them: Do the vaccines actually inhibit transmission, and by how much? Are new variants of the virus really much more likely to emerge from the unvaccinated than from the vaccinated? How likely is it that new variants will be more lethal, instead of less so?

And then there are political questions, which reasonable people are more than capable of debating productively, such as: Do vaccine mandates represent an unprecedented new power on the part of the state, or is it just an instantiation of powers that the state has exercised for generations (through earlier vaccine mandates, for example)? Does an individual’s moral obligation to help protect society override his or her personal rights, including that of bodily autonomy? Can we justify resorting to coercive measures to compel vaccine compliance even before instituting alternative solutions, such as expanding ICU capacity to avoid displacing patients with other life-threatening conditions?

But none of those questions are guiding the discourse on vaccine mandates, because there are barely any spaces left in which people on either side of the issue are able to have a rational discussion with one another. Instead, we have those who favor mandates in one silo, fuming about the selfish “anti-vaxxers” who would sooner see millions more die than forfeit an inch of their precious “freedom.” And in the other silo, we have those who oppose them raging against the deranged tyrants hell-bent on forcing everyone into endless lockdowns, masks and booster shots to protect us against a virus that kills only one in a hundred of the people it infects.

Out of these fever swamps, where groupthink is affirmed over and over and never opposed, emerge only the most extreme positions on what to do about the pandemic. So on the one hand you have calls for mask mandates both inside and out, vaccine passports, draconian restrictions on public assembly including indefinite school closures, and punitive measures for non-compliance, up to and including denial of medical care. On the other hand you have a growing refusal even to acknowledge the existence of the pandemic, and a mounting collective paranoia over vaccine profiteering, the ever-expanding surveillance state and the emergence of quarantine camps and other autocratic mechanisms of control. On both sides you have a near-total intolerance for those on the other side, who are regarded not merely as opponents but as amoral monsters.

Extend this template beyond vaccine mandates to all of our politics, and you start to see the conditions that give rise to authoritarianism. Like many, Gellman seems to view the transformation from democracy to authoritarianism primarily as a top-down process, orchestrated by powerful people in influential positions. To the extent that it’s a grassroots phenomenon, it’s merely assisted by a cadre of useful idiot foot soldiers. But historically, authoritarianism has always been a bottom-up phenomenon as well. It requires the active collaboration of ordinary people. It relies on a high degree of willingness to comply with authority, as well as a willingness on the part of at least part of the population to actively assist the regime in power, to act as the government’s eyes and ears, enforcing the rules and ratting out the rule breakers.

On that count, the threat of authoritarianism is as dire on the political left as on the political right. It’s not the right but the left of center that’s calling for social media censorship, ideological conformity, obedience to the state, and a restoration of respect for established authority. It’s the left that’s trivializing basic concerns over individual rights as some kind of extremist dogma. These are not democratic instincts at work. They are the nascent form of a citizenry that’s conditioned to obey. All it takes is the right set of opportunistic actors to shape them into a new social order.

I’m singling out the left to make a point, but the same tendencies have been evident on the right for a long time now. Trump was obviously a tryhard autocrat, and his most zealous supporters would make great brownshirts (or maybe terrible ones). For all of his hype, Gellman isn’t mistaken to be concerned by the antics of January 6.

But his concern is selective. He sees only on the right what is in fact everywhere. That bias is obviously typical of the media, though maybe a little more disappointing coming from one of the journalists who published the Snowden leaks.

As Gellman would surely recall, Snowden once described the surveillance apparatus that he exposed as a “turnkey tyranny.” That apparatus is still in place. The only thing preventing a present or future president from flipping the switch is their awareness of our stubborn will to disobey, no matter who’s in charge. If that will is vanishing, it’s not just on the MAGA side.

1. They/them are Gessen’s preferred pronouns.