During the last year of the first Trump presidency, M. Gessen wrote a book about what lessons Americans could learn from countries like Russia and Hungary. The book, called “Surviving Autocracy,” draws on Gessen’s own experiences growing up in Russia and the scholarship of European philosophers who have written about modern-day authoritarianism. We talk to Gessen in front of a student audience at Grant High School.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller, coming to you today in front of a student audience at Grant High School in Northeast Portland. We’re spending the hour with the Russian American writer and journalist M. Gessen.
[Audience applause]
In 2017, Gessen won a National Book Award for “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia.” It was a meticulous and also personal exploration of life in post-Soviet Union Russia after Vladimir Putin consolidated power there. Three years later, Gessen explored many of those same themes in a book called “Surviving Autocracy.” There was one big difference though. The primary focus wasn’t Putin’s Russia, but Trump’s America. That was at the end of President Trump’s first term. Gessen has been clear-eyed the second time around that the slide toward autocracy in the U.S. has only accelerated.
Gessen is the author of 11 books of nonfiction. They were a staff writer at The New Yorker and are now an opinion writer at The New York Times. Welcome back to Think Out Loud.
M. Gessen: Thank you. It’s great to be here.
Miller: Since we are in a high school in front of a bunch of seniors, I want to ask you about what I understand to be your first job as a journalist when you were 17 or so. What did you do?
Gessen: I talked my way into a job at a gay paper in Boston called Bay Windows. My first job was doing layout, which I actually knew a couple of things about, so it was enough … You guys have no idea what doing layout is, right?
OK, so back in those days, this was 1983, 1984, there were typesetting machines that would spit out everything that was going to be in the paper in these long, shiny, thick paper ribbons that were the width of a column. And you had to wax those ribbons and paste them onto boards in the correct order with the correct spacing, and then put down tape where they would call them dividers, little lines of tape. Then a proofreader would read this and mark mistakes in invisible marker – visible to the human eye, not visible to an industrial printer. Then you would have to cut out correction lines and paste them very carefully over the lines that had mistakes in them. So, that was my job.
Miller: And this is just about three or four years after you had emigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union?
Gessen: Yeah, more like two or three years, yeah.
Miller: So what you just described is a more technical version of journalism. Was there also a time when you were young when you were given the authority to ask people questions, when you did a version of what you’re doing now?
Gessen: Yeah, so after I started doing layout … This was a community newspaper, so everybody did everything. Some of the everything were things that people knew how to do and some of the everything were people were things that people didn’t know how to do. I had no idea how to do journalism, but I went, did an interview and transcribed the interview just in its entirety, Q&A, and thought that was journalism. And then I was mortified when the editor actually rewrote it and used some quotes and a lot of narrative. I was like, “Oh, that’s how it’s done.”
Then I started reading books on journalism and doing stories. A couple of years later, I was editor of a gay and lesbian magazine in Boston, and I’ve been a journalist ever since.
Miller: To me, one of the amazing powers of getting to do this work is it gives you the license to ask people questions when you otherwise wouldn’t have it. I’m wondering, when you were young and an immigrant, was that power especially enticing?
Gessen: I don’t even know how much it has to do with being young and an immigrant, although certainly those are exacerbating circumstances. I’m also just very, very shy. And a lot of journalists I know are very shy people who are curious about the world. So you’re kind of locked in when you’re shy and curious about the world. And one of the few ways to break out of that shell is to have a job that requires you to indulge your curiosities.
Miller: Requires and enables?
Gessen: Requires and enables. Yeah.
Miller: Let’s turn right now, to what you wrote recently. A week after the election, you wrote that based on Trump’s own words and the actions of authoritarian leaders around the world, we could expect to see attacks on the judiciary, on courts, on media, on universities, on nonprofits – all of which has happened. You said civil society groups, especially those that serve or advocate for immigrants, formerly incarcerated people, LGBTQ people, women in vulnerable groups, they’ll be attacked. They may come for the unions.
Has anything in the last 108 days surprised you then?
Gessen: The speed has surprised me. I knew intellectually that it was going to be faster than the first term, but I couldn’t prepare myself for just how fast it has been. And I have obvious concerns about the speed of it. I think it’s an incredibly effective approach for this administration, because it is moving at a speed that cannot be matched by deliberative institutions. All of our defenses are institutions like the judiciary, like Congress, like other smaller elected bodies that are all slow, and they’re slow by design because deliberation is slow.
When you attack slow institutions at an incredibly high speed, that creates an asymmetry that I think is very difficult to overcome. Conceivably impossible to overcome because by the time a case makes its way through the judiciary, the damage has already been done. We saw that with the deportations of men to El Salvador, where it was a sort of obscene illustration of how that works, because obviously, the judge was rushing and the judge said, “Turn the planes around.” And oopsie, it was too late. But it’s an illustration of something that’s actually happening across the board. So that’s my one concern about the speed at which things are happening.
My other concern is that I have a feeling that we have entered a new stage in the last week or two, which is all the attacks have started and progressed to some extent, with the possible exception of unions. I fear that means that we’re entering a stage of a kind of boredom, a kind of familiarity, where everything …
Miller: Boredom on the part of whom? Boredom among all of us?
Gessen: Among all of us
Miller: Societal boredom and that we’re used to this? This is a new norm?
Gessen: Exactly. You see a headline – and it’s a headline like all the other headlines – and things can be both catastrophic and boring at the same time. That’s something that I’m very familiar with from reporting on wars. And I’ve seen people report on wars for the first time in their lives. And like the first 24 hours, every time a missile lands or you get information that a missile is flying, or somebody gets shot, it’s shocking, it’s news. And then the next day, somebody gets shot, a missile flies and there’s a bomb. Then the next day, it’s the exact same thing. Actually, the repertoire of war is very limited, as is the repertoire of autocratic breakthroughs.
Miller: What you’re describing is deeply embedded in human brains. I mean, our brains are used to looking for novelty, danger or new dangers. And our brains are very good at tuning out things that we think we know.
Gessen: Exactly. And that’s what makes the human species in a way beautiful, right? We can get habituated to almost anything. We’re incredibly adaptable, but it also trips us up because it can’t possibly be so bad if you’re just living your life and you get up in the morning, you go to this beautiful school and you interact with your wonderful friends. And yeah, it’s unfortunate that it’s happening in this historical context, but it can’t possibly be as bad as the things that you read about in books, which always focus on the catastrophic and never on the everyday.
Miller: Let’s take a question from the audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Audience Member: Yeah, hi. My name is Maya. My question was, with the rise of social media and President Trump’s utilization of it, do you think that the government and people’s usage of social media will change at all? And if so, how?
Gessen: Well, I think the use of social media changes all the time. It’s part of the dynamic nature of the medium. But of course, even the word medium is a little unfortunate here, because usually when we talk about media, we talk about something that mediates between the source of information and the recipient of information, right? So that’s when we talk about journalism, when we talk about newspapers, there is a whole sort of mechanism for absorbing and transmitting information. And social media is actually unmediated.
Miller: No gatekeepers.
Gessen: There are no gatekeepers. There are no interpreters. It’s direct communication from, in this case, the president to his constituency. And that’s novel. That’s something that’s genuinely different. I think a lot of the things that we ascribe to social media are not genuinely new, but this is a completely new experience of politics. When you constantly see the president communicating directly and, in this particular case, lying directly to hundreds of millions of people.
Miller: You wrote recently that, “The autocracies of the 20th century relied on mass terror. Those of the 21st often don’t need to. Their subjects comply willingly.” Why? What changed?
Gessen: That’s a great question. And this is something that I wrote about in “The Future is History,” but I think I underestimated the global nature of this phenomenon. In “The Future is History,” one of the protagonists in the book – and I followed the development of his thinking over the course of many years – is a sociologist, who starts out thinking that people who were shaped by mass political terror in the Soviet Union must be dying off in the late 1980s because terror … when millions of people go to the gulag and hundreds of thousands are executed summarily. Terror ended in 1953. And after that, there was a kind of economy of repression, but you couldn’t call it terror.
So he starts out thinking that those people must be dying off and that must change society. It must not be so pliable without terror. And then over the course of several decades, he discovers to his absolute horror that those habits of accommodating to terror, of obeying what a government that has terror in its back pocket, that those habits don’t go anywhere, and they don’t even disappear with subsequent generations.
Now that I’m looking at this country, where, not all people, but most people have never had the experience of terror … and the reason I emphasize “not all people” is that actually there are large populations of Black people in this country who have lived in a police state through their entire lives. But a majority of people have never experienced a police state or political terror. And yet, small signs that political terror is operating, like the deportations of people to El Salvador, like somebody getting arrested by the people in civilian clothing in the middle of the day, in a suburb of Boston, and pushed into an unmarked car seem to have really clear reverberations, seem to push people into obedience, despite people have not having had the experience of terror. That’s just one explanation.
Miller: I wonder if you could tell us your own story of this from 20 years ago, when you were living in Russia and editing an article about the way Putin handled a hostage crisis at a school with hundreds of kids there. Do you mind telling us that story?
Gessen: I’m not sure I remember what you’re asking.
Miller: Well, I read about it in an op-ed you wrote a few months ago. And my recollection is that you were asked, not by a henchman of Putin, but by a fellow journalist to change a headline, I think it was.
Gessen: No, no, to pull the piece altogether. So another explanation for how this functions is that a lot of the time people make accommodations to an autocrat based on their values. And their values can be protecting people whom they employ, protecting their associates, protecting profits. So, protecting their shareholders.
This is what was happening 20 years ago. I was deputy editor of a city magazine in Moscow. I was assigned this really great opinion piece. I had seen somebody post on social media about going to a state-sponsored protest in Moscow against this terrorist attack. So they gathered people for this show protest against the terrorist attack, and this guy decided to crash the government’s rally and bring his own poster. And he painted a poster that said, “Putin has blood on his hands.” And he went out into the streets of Moscow with his poster looking for this rally, but he couldn’t find it.
I asked him to describe his experience of wandering the streets of central Moscow. He was also like 6′4”, so the whole image was amazing with this poster that said, “Putin has blood on his hands.” He wrote this piece, it was really evocative. I had just finished editing and was about to push it through the system when the publisher of the publishing house, which contained this magazine and a couple of other publications, said if you publish this, 325 people might lose their jobs.
He was acting in accordance with his values. He had never been told by the Kremlin what to do, but he had seen enough, three years into Putin’s presidency, to know that this was pushing boundaries and may put people in danger.
Miller: What are the lessons from that one story for us right now – for hospital administrators, for schools, for law firms, for media organizations? The list goes on.
Gessen: Yeah, so I don’t often like making pragmatic arguments, but this is a very pragmatic one. The lesson is that accommodations don’t work. The illusion is always, oh, we just stay off the radar, under the radar, or we take precautions so that they don’t attack us, or we give them an inch so that they leave us alone, never works. The publishing house is now long since controlled by the state and the publisher who made me pull that piece has been living in exile for a long time. And that’s true of everyone I know who accommodated Putin on behalf of educational institutions, publishing enterprises, etc.
Miller: Do you regret pulling that piece?
Gessen: I don’t regret pulling that piece because I replaced it with a much more political piece which I wrote myself. And I don’t know if he didn’t see it or his logic was that it wasn’t going to be quite as dangerous, even though it was much more definitive because it didn’t call out Putin by name. But I saw there’s this Russian pop group called t.A.T.u. And we are on the radio, so I can’t curse?
Miller: That’s correct and thank you for asking.
Gessen: They had attended some talk show in T-shirts that said, “‘Expletive’ the war.” So I actually ended up publishing a piece that I wrote myself called “‘expletive’ of the war” that ripped off of this pop group’s appearance, and talked about the hostage taking and the way that the Kremlin had handled it. So in that particular situation, I feel like I was able to solve the problem in the best possible way.
Miller: What does courage mean to you in this context?
Gessen: I don’t think that courage means not being afraid. If you’re not afraid, then you’re not being brave, you’re just not afraid. Courage means overcoming fear, understanding the fear, understanding the danger and being at least a little bit braver than you thought you would be.
Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. What is your name and what’s your question?
Audience Member: Hi, I’m Megumi. I was wondering, through your journalism career, have your opinions ever changed looking back on yourself?
Gessen: Oh, definitely, I don’t know that my sort of overall political values have changed, but I’ve certainly changed my opinions about … Well, I’ve made wrong predictions, as all journalists have. Journalists are famously reluctant to make predictions because we shouldn’t make predictions. Arguably nobody should ever make predictions, but still, we fail, we make predictions, and those predictions often fail.
For example, in 2011-2012, during mass protests in Russia against Putin’s regime, I was really convinced that it was the end of his regime, that there was no way it was going to survive. I should have known better and the reason that I should have known better is that I knew that I couldn’t reason my way to the downfall of his regime. It was just a feeling. The feeling was that there’s no way that this mass revolution can fail – and the feeling was wrong.
Miller: Let’s go to another question from our audience here.
Audience Member: Hi, I’m Louis. My question is, Trump recently released the 2028-branded hats and I’m wondering what you think about how that affects our constitution?
Gessen: This is one of the arguments that I’ve had with my colleagues at The New York Times, and obviously people have had the same argument everywhere. Some people believe that this is a joke, that this can’t possibly come to pass because the Constitution does not allow Trump to run for a third term, as far as we can tell. I disagree. I think we have to take this extremely seriously. I’m not going to make predictions about whether he’s going to be successful in finding a way to circumvent the constitutional prohibition on a third term, but I am quite convinced that he’s about to try.
Miller: You’ve said in the past – and I feel like this may connect to what you’re talking about here, that we have to take what he says seriously – “Bad ideas do a lot of the work of building autocracy.” What do you mean by that?
Gessen: So early on, a lot of people were trying to calm themselves by saying that this administration is incompetent, that Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing and that he has no ideas. And actually, he and his people have lots of ideas. They’re just really bad ideas. But bad ideas are easy to mobilize some people around. They’re easy to articulate. But they also serve to degrade our political culture, to degrade our thinking, to degrade everything that’s associated with political culture, including the media, because we are willy-nilly pulled into debating these really terrible ideas. It makes everything dumber. And that’s one of the things that enables autocracy.
Miller: Well, what is the argument there for, say, annexing Greenland or making Canada the 51st state? What’s the connection between those sort of outlandish … because we’re not talking about, should the marginal tax rate go up by 0.25%, we’re talking about things that are far beyond the pale of what used to be normal American political conversation. What do those serve, bringing up ideas like that?
Gessen: Well, first of all, I think we need to take them literally. So he actually does want to annex Canada and Greenland. Bringing them up most directly serves to normalize them as part of his agenda. The first time we hear it, we think, oh my God, that’s ridiculous, where did he even come up with that? It stops being ridiculous. It becomes, if not probable, then at least possible. Then we start finding historical roots for these ideas … and there’s actually quite a bit to be mined on the topic of Greenland. Suddenly, it becomes part of the imaginable world.
Miller: I want to go back to what you were saying before in terms of the pace of change. You mentioned courts, and that courts and other aspects of a functioning civil society move a lot slower than the administration moves now. I’ve lost count of the number of court cases that have been filed so far. The results so far have been a mixture of both, in terms of the initial rulings that have come out and also the way the administration has responded to those.
But to what extent do you see the judicial branch in our country, right now, as an effective check on this executive’s power?
Gessen: Well, the honest answer is we don’t know. There have been some encouraging signs because the administration has lost a lot of cases in district courts, including cases that came up before conservative judges, including even in some cases that were decided by Trump-appointed judges.
There are two huge questions that we don’t yet know answers to. One is, what is the Supreme Court going to do on some individual cases, but also on the overall problem of Trump versus the judiciary? And the second question is how far is this administration going to push its refusal to obey the judicial decisions?
Going back to the subject of speed, what I’m also really concerned about is the facts on the ground that are established by this administration’s actions in contravention of judicial decisions or in between judicial decisions, while the courts do their business slowly. One very clear example is what’s happening with transgender troops. Trump has revived his first term ban on transgender troops in a much more radical way. So in his first term, he banned enlistment by transgender people. In the second term, he has issued an executive order that requires transgender people to be dismissed from the service. So either they have to quit on their own or face the risk of involuntary separation from the military, which can cost them their veterans benefits.
The lower courts, a district court, stayed this executive order, which means it said that it’s illegal. And then the Supreme Court allowed the administration to proceed, until and unless the Supreme Court hears an appeal of the case. So what’s happening now is that transgender people – actually that’s tens of thousands of people – are being forced out of the military while the case winds its way through the courts. If the Supreme Court hears the case, and if the Supreme Court is actually consistent with its earlier decisions and rules that these executive orders unconstitutional, there will still be tens of thousands of people who have had their careers ended by the military, as a result of the executive order.
I think it’s very likely, even in the event that the Supreme Court ultimately rules that this order is unconstitutional, that the U.S. military will become entirely unaccepting of transgender troops. So just the speed at which the administration is moving can render judicial checks completely ineffective.
Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Audience Member: My name is Ben. I also had a question about the speed of Trump’s actions. Do you believe that the speed of Trump’s actions will slow down after the rush of these first few months of his presidency, or will they remain constant or even accelerate throughout the rest?
Gessen: Well, like I said, we journalists don’t like to make predictions. So I don’t know if it’s going to speed up or slow down. What I do know is that it’s going to feel like it’s slowed down because they have established the repertoire of things that they’re going to do. There isn’t going to be a whole lot of completely new stuff, which is what we experienced in the first 100 days.
Miller: One of the phrases that you’ve been using a fair amount in your writing recently to describe the Trump administration is “mafia state.” What is a mafia state?
Gessen: So mafia state is a term that, in modern times, has been popularized by Hungarian political scientists. And I think it’s very useful for understanding this kind of political regime and this kind of political culture. What’s really key about it is that there’s one person at the center of it who distributes both money and power.
To give you an example, when Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia, one of the very first things he did is he gathered all the oligarchs – all these very wealthy men who had turned their money into political power and their political power into more money. And he said to them, OK, now, you have to hand over your political power and I will decide whether you get to keep all of some of your money. And they agreed. And those of them who did not agree either went into exile immediately. One person, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who at the time was the wealthiest man in Russia, went to prison for 10 years. So that’s how Putin showed that he was serious.
I would argue that Trump is building a mafia state. So, a state in which, even though he is surrounded himself by extremely wealthy people, people who clearly have a lot more money than he’s ever had, he is putting in place mechanisms for controlling not just their political power, but also their access to money, their ability to stay as wealthy as they have been or to become wealthier. To understand how this kind of regime works, we really have to think about how much hangs on access to this one person who becomes the center of all the power.
Miller: There’s another question from our audience. Go ahead.
Audience Member: My name is Samuel. My question is about the freedoms of speech and of the press. These freedoms are widely considered as vital to our democracy, but how, if at all, can they be balanced against restricting hate speech or misinformation?
Gessen: Hate speech is not a huge issue. And the reason I said that is that Americans tend to think that restricting hate speech is a slippery slope that will infringe on the First Amendment. First of all, we restrict speech all the time, including, for example, earlier when I asked Dave, “Can I curse on the radio?” He said, “No, you cannot.” And somehow, we managed to convey information. We can convey information and have political discussions without engaging in hate speech. European countries that have robust media protections also have very specific prohibitions on hate speech across the board. So I think that’s a little bit of a red herring where it comes to freedom of speech issues.
Misinformation, disinformation, unchecked information is a much thornier issue. And it’s very hard to answer that sort of in a one-minute radio sound bite. But let me just stay with the idea that it is genuinely complicated. It becomes more complicated as more people have access to social media and as for more people, social media becomes their sole source of information.
Miller: In the list of entities or institutions that you said we were likely to see attacks, universities were high on that list and indeed that’s been one of the big themes of the last 100-plus days. Why? What do universities represent?
Gessen: Universities are great because they represent so many things at the same time. They represent an implied challenge to the monopoly on political power because they are independent centers of thought. And as a result, they’re independent centers of political power. Also to Trump, they represent the dreaded elites. They represent a target that’s very convenient for mobilizing this anti-elite base. And yes, he is absolutely a product of the elite and these elite institutions, as is most of his administration, but he is very good at positioning himself as sort of the mouthpiece of people who resent the elites. Universities represent the dreaded DEI, universities represent LGBTQ people, universities represent Jews. Universities represent centers of tolerance for everything that he’s encouraging his base to be intolerant of.
Miller: You wrote, not too long ago, about what Harvard did in resisting the Trump administration’s unprecedented demands, after Columbia did the opposite – said, “OK, fine, we’ll do what you want,” and then didn’t really get anything from that. But as you’ve noted, and as many other people have noted, Harvard has a $53 billion endowment, which can cushion you from a lot of federal slings and arrows. Your prescription is that all universities should do things more like what Bard College does, which is stick to not thinking about U.S. News and World Report rankings, or how much money their graduates make, but the heart of why they’re there, which is education.
I’m curious how you think about broadening that prescription for tiny schools, but just for all kinds of other institutions that are also facing attacks – not the richest law firms, but small arts organizations, small agencies that have been disbanded? What is the analog for what Bard College did?
Gessen: So let me speak a little bit more broadly because one of the counterarguments to my prescription for universities, which is basically to spend your endowments, teach as many people as you possibly can … One of the counterarguments was, well, we’ll run out of money and also that’s not going to make up for the loss in federal research funding. And that’s absolutely true. They will run out of money, some of them will have to go to shut down and they cannot solve it. That’s not a solution for the problem of losing federal funding.
We’re living in a catastrophe. There’s no solution. There are better and worse ways of responding. And responding by sitting on your endowment is the worst way of responding because you may preserve the endowment, but you’re not going to have a university to go with it in a few years. That’s what we are seeing play out at Columbia in a really tragic way.
So, to broaden it out to other organizations, act as though you’re living in a catastrophic time. Do not try to protect your assets because focusing on protecting the assets at the expense of protecting the mission will mean that assets will be all that’s left.
Miller: Let’s see another question from your audience. Go ahead.
Audience Member: Hi, my name is Tayon. I was wondering what advice you have for young people today living through Trump’s presidency, like how we can retaliate and protect ourselves.
Gessen: Well, that’s a very broad question. And also, I don’t give advice. But I think that the thing about living in an autocracy or a country that’s undergoing an autocratic transformation is that it really, in some ways, affects everybody, not in the sense that it is a risk to everybody. And this is where I really disagree with this argument that you have to stand up for other people because they’ll come for you. That’s not true, they will not come for most people. They didn’t come for most people in Nazi Germany. This whole idea that by the time they came for me, there was nobody left to speak up. That’s a poem. That’s not how the political system actually worked.
But what is true is that everybody is, at least in some way, a participant or in some way adjacent to something that is profoundly affected by the attacks that this administration is undertaking on educational institutions and all the things that we have listed. And I think that what young people can do is they can insist that these institutions that they’re part of act in accordance with their core mission and resist. If your school or your university takes down its DEI page, go and protest against the school taking down the DEI page.
Miller: So to follow up on that line, that oft-repeated phrase is not accurate, that not everybody is a target. As you mentioned earlier, trans people are a very big target right now, not just in the U.S., but by autocratic regimes in a lot of different countries. Why? What makes trans people good targets now for these regimes?
Gessen: Well, trans people are sort of perfect as a scapegoat in every way. Autocratic regimes will always target a very, very small group. And do you know how many Jews there were in Germany at the time that Hitler came to power? Like, you probably imagine at least a few percent?
Miller: Yeah.
Gessen: Yeah, half of a percent of the population.
Miller: Huh.
Gessen: So they’re more trans people.
Miller: But they certainly played an outsized role in a lot of aspects of society than half a percent would make it seem.
Gessen: That’s an arguable point and that’s a point that people often make about the origins of anti-Semitism. I think the only thing that we can actually say with confidence about Jews in German society in the 1930s is that they played a greater role in business and in academia than they had a generation or two earlier. So they stood out because Jews had not been in those spheres just a generation or two earlier.
That is a direct parallel to trans people. Trans people have been around for a while, but trans people have really only been visible in this country for a very short amount of time. There’s never been a trans New York Times opinion columnist before. There are a couple of other visible trans journalists and that’s only been true for a couple of years, literally.
So one of the things that trans people represent is rapid social change that Trump promises to reverse. Another thing that we represent is every parent’s greatest fear, which is that they will not speak the same language as their children because their children are representatives of a changing society. So the political promise here is, we’ll bring your children back into the home, we’ll make sure that you can talk to them, that they’re not separate from you.
Then the third thing is that most people don’t know any trans people, just as most people did not know any Jews in Hitler’s Germany. So there’s very little in people’s lived experience to counteract the propaganda that they hear, such as, “Trans people are recruiting your daughters,” “Your child may go to school and come back with a different gender.” All this crazy stuff that is made more believable because most Americans have never actually – as you are right now – sat next to a trans person.
Miller: As you said, you don’t want to give advice. So I can maybe ask this in a way that it’s more about your own practices as opposed to what you think other people should do. But in relation to the speed of what’s happening, and the cavalcade of information that can and does hit our eyeballs and our ears, how do you navigate it? How do you decide what to pay attention to?
Gessen: So first of all, that’s really hard. Like, that’s genuinely hard. It’s an assault on all of our senses.
Miller: And I should say, part of this it just has to do with the speed of 21st century information, completely separate from everything we’ve been talking about in terms of authoritarianism. But we’re already dealing with an attention catastrophe before we add in anything political – it’s worth acknowledging that. So how do you think about it just as an individual?
Gessen: I think of myself as actually being very lucky because I have a job to do. The job was very clear. I know that I have to take in information. I have to form an opinion about it. I have to make a good argument. I have to put it in the paper. But all of us have jobs to do. And I think that the best thing that we can do is focus on that, right? Your job is not to doom scroll. Your job is to know what you need to know about a thing that you’re doing and to do it in the best way possible, given these catastrophic political circumstances. And that means to be the most engaged high school or university student, for example.
Miller: Do you think of your job to change people’s minds? You seemed allergic to the idea of either prognosticating or giving advice, but do you want to change people’s minds?
Gessen: I think that from everything we know about how people process information, reading a column in a newspaper cannot change anybody’s mind. That’s just not a thing that happens. So it would be foolhardy of me to think that I can change people’s minds.
What I know has been most helpful to me in my history of reading is when I see analysis that makes me feel like, oh, someone just shone a bright light on something, and I get it. It makes me feel calmer and better oriented, even in catastrophic times. So, my ambition is to do that sort of thing.
Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Audience Member: My name’s Sadie. My question is, with the rise of social media as well as the term fake news, how do we build more trust in media or how do you think journalists should be seen by the public?
Gessen: There are a lot of very smart people trying to answer this specific question. How do we build trust in the media? First of all, we have to be trustworthy. I think there have been some really significant failures of media in the last couple of decades that have genuinely undermined trust in media, because we did great damage to ourselves.
We can talk about this for a long time, so let me just throw in one idea that’s a little bit provocative, which is, I think we really have to treat our readers, viewers or media consumers in any medium as smarter than we do what we currently do. I think, actually, The New York Times opinion page where I work treats its readers as very, very smart. And I think that’s one of the things that makes it quite effective. But I think that’s not true of most media outlets, whether print or broadcast. And I think we have greatly contributed to the dumbing down of our political culture, and that dumbing down doesn’t make political culture more accessible. It actually separates people from politics. I think that that’s on us and we have to try to repair that.
Miller: My assumption – and correct me if you don’t share this – is that a majority of your readers in The New York Times would largely agree with a lot of what you have to say about Donald Trump. Do you more or less agree with that?
Gessen: I think that’s probably true.
Miller: How much do you think about that? As you said, you’re not trying to change people’s minds, which is an important caveat to add into this, I suppose, as I give you this long question. But how much do you want to reach the slight majority of the American electorate who did vote for him?
Gessen: I am not under any illusions that most people who voted for Donald Trump would be likely to read a piece written by an immigrant Jewish trans writer …
Miller: … in The New York Times.
Gessen: … in the New York Times. And say, oh …
Miller: … I was wrong.
Gessen: So that’s really not my job and I think it would be silly of me to pretend that’s a significant contribution that I can make. I think there are other contributions that I can make. And just because somebody may agree with all or most of what I have to say about Donald Trump doesn’t mean I can’t help people to get their bearings, to get more information, to make better arguments to their friends, colleagues and family members. And ultimately, the way that people’s minds are changed is not by reading any piece in any newspaper, it’s by personal contact.
Miller: How do you go through the world every day when it’s a beautiful, sunny day and keep in mind that you’re living through a catastrophe? How do you keep both of those in mind at the same time daily?
Gessen: That is a really insightful question. And I think that’s part of the authoritarian bargain, actually, which in a lot of countries … and I don’t think we’re living in an authoritarian state, right? An authoritarian state is largely apolitical. Basically, the authoritarian wants people to go home, live their private lives and not pay attention. That’s not what we’re living through, but it’s useful to know that that bargain works in a lot of countries. If people are living well, or at least decently, then it’s hard to believe that something really terrible is happening because it’s not happening to you personally most of the time.
So that requires a mental effort and that, actually, is where I think I can make a contribution. That’s where a slight changing of the mind happens. If I write engagingly enough to grab the attention of somebody who would otherwise be thinking only about this lovely weather, then I’ve done my job.
Miller: M. Gessen, thanks very much.
Gessen: Thank you.
Miller: Thanks as always as well to Olivia Jones-Hall and Literary Arts, and to Paige Battle, Sunshine McFaul and Branic Howard who helped set this up. Thanks to everybody here at Grant High School.
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