Surviving Autocracy

If you read this book thinking that Masha Gessen is going to give tips for how to survive autocracy, you will be disappointed. Instead, they analyze the Trump presidency as an autocratic attempt. The chapters on political language and journalism in the Trump era are particularly fascinating. Gessen contends that Trump has rendered a lot of political language that we are used to hearing meaningless now, and that legacy journalism (New York Times and the like) has helped to normalize Trump's behavior by covering it neutrally as though this were a normal presidency. The only parts of the book that come close to advice on surviving autocracy come late in the book, when Gessen writes about healing and rebuilding after Trump. What will be needed, they say, is leaders who can bring us back to a discussion of what American moral values and ideals are, and help us move in the direction of those ideals.