Unlike everyone else on the planet, I don’t have a pat explanation or interpretation of the election results. The analysis of why people choose one thing over another is an art, not a science, and I can imagine many things that might have mattered, ranging from generalized doubts about whether a woman can be president to specific gripes this particular woman, or even about, say, fracking in Pennsylvania. Sam Harris has written an eloquent critique of the far-left and its impact on the election, if that is to your taste. The Washington Post has published a fascinating account of the Trump campaign’s false flag advertising.
I do believe that not enough attention has been paid to the fact that perceptions of reality, as received through one’s telephone, are now more powerful than real reality. As the editor of the New Republic points out, that online reality is now dominated by the far right. The expression “mainstream media” is so far out of date as to be laughable. The New York Times, CNN and the Wall Street Journal are not the mainstream. They do not set the agenda. They reach far fewer people than the network created by Fox, Sinclair, iHeart, OANN, X and the Russian government’s extensive troll farms and paid influencers.
For readers of this substack, I thought it might be useful to gather together a reading list, some things from the past few years I and others have written that might help explain, what is happening now, and what could happen. As I’ve written repeatedly, the threat from leaders like Trump is not that they will turn America into a movie about the Third Reich. The threat is what political scientists call autocratic state capture - that they will take control of institutions that should belong to everyone, and transform them into institutions that serve them and their cronies, either politically or financially. In the US we also face a specific version of this threat: unaccountable tech oligarchs may begin to shape our economic and foreign policy in ways that benefit them personally, but are bad for the rest of us.
Why do I think this will happen? As I wrote before the election, Trump’s use of autocratic language, the talk of vermin and “enemies” and of using the police against traitors, is a very old way to build support for the idea that “our side” deserves to break the law, because “their side” is immoral, illegal, or even subhuman. Trump’s use of this kind of language during the campaign could have been, among other things, a way of preparing the electorate for dramatic change, for the transformation of institutions, even for violence (I also thought it might be a way of preparing to steal the election, which in the end wasn’t necessary).
The nature of state capture is most clearly laid out in the podcast I put together with Peter Pomerantsev, Autocracy in America. Completed before the election, it describes the ways in which our political system was already weakened and prepared for this kind of change, not least because attempts to capture the state have happened in America before. One of our episodes is about Huey Long, the autocratic governor of Louisiana in the 1930s. Another is about the word “freedom,” which has been used by Americans in the past to mean “freedom from having to obey the federal government.” Even in the present moment, we already have partially politicized courts; our economic system is already too friendly to foreign corruption. We already have politicians who know how to use lies to change reality too. You can read the transcripts but I think it works better to listen. Available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Youtube etc. Or start here. There is no paywall.
Both of my recent, shorter books address some elements of this story too. Twilight of Democracy, published in 2020, attempted to explain how and why “elite,” educated people living in democracies might be attracted to the far-right. Autocracy Inc, published last summer, describes the network of dictatorships that now seek to undermine liberal democracy, economically, politically and above all through propaganda and information war. This international background helps to explain the extraordinary danger of the current moment, especially give the president-elect’s initial military and intelligence appointments.
I’m not just pushing these books for their own sake. In both of them I make long arguments that don’t fit into a substack post or magazine article.
Other people are writing along these lines too. Timothy Snyder, in his recent substack posts, argues that, “taken together, Trump’s candidates constitute an attempt to wreck the American government.” Masha Gessen has also written about the deep appeal of authoritarian propaganda in the New York Times. She quotes the Hungarian writer Balint Magyar, who ways that “Liberal democracy offers moral constraints without problem-solving” — a lot of rules, not a lot of change — while “populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints.” Both Snyder and Gessen have written books about this subject too. Try Gessen’s Surviving Autocracy and Synder’s On Freedom. Also Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, as well as Ziblatt and Levitsky’s How Democracies Die, if you haven’t read them already.
In the coming months, my colleagues at the Atlantic and elsewhere will be posting daily on the significance of Trump’s appointments and the first decisions of his administration. I will try to pass it on. And when I have something to say about these themes and others, I will pass that on too. Greetings from Bratislava, capital of Slovakia, a country that is also experiencing an attempt at state capture, but also a city of marvelous doors…
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