Rivalry between countries in the Indo Pacific Region of the world. Enjoy booktv on cspan2. Good evening everybody and welcome to politics and prose and to tmt life, our new Live Streaming service. Im one of the coowners of politics and prose along with my husband brad graham and behalf of our entire staff we welcome you to tonights event which we all have been so excited about and i am sure all of you are too. Let me just say a few housekeeping things at the beginning. First of all, you will see at the bottom of your screen up purchase button. We really hope you will purchase the book tonight from our website. You can get there by clicking on that button and we have are very excited that these books have signed book places in them so if you order from our website you will get a signed copy of the book. 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You can also vote on the questions that others have asked and if you see a question you most want to have answered i know that dalia and masha will try to get to as many as possible. We do have a firm cut off time. Masha is going on to [inaudible] tonight so we need to make sure she is able to do that. I will get going and you will be able to hear from her in a moment. I just would like to say masha has appeared at politics and prose and number of times for quite a few of her books. We are always delighted to have them at the store and glad to have them online and for many reasons but i think that right now i cant think of a time when we have needed them more at this truly terrifying moment in american history. Masha will be discussing their latest book called surviving autocracy which was written just as this finished as this coronavirus was hitting and obviously before events but masha was able to not only sneak in a new app election but go back and rework quite a bit of the book. I know that was probably a near Impossible Task but she pulled it off. And tonight we will be to hear her most uptodate ideas and many of which are in the book as well. You know, having masha as aghast and talking about the subject the best way to thing about this is what a New York Times reporter or book reviewer said a few days ago which was when it comes to autocracy you need to hear and listen to masha gessen and that is the way we feel about this new book. So, we are really looking forward to the conversation prayed i will tell you a little bit about her background in case you do not know. Having grown up in the soviet union before immigrating here as a teenager masha went back to russia to report on the rise of Vladimir Putin and russias democracy. She moved to new york permanently in 2013 and targeted by putin. Being here they did not stop writing us and warren mean us about how fascism takes through. Masha has been a contributor to the new yorker and has written ten previous books and is has won more awards than i could possibly list here for journalists included the National Book award in 2017. She continues to be an extraordinarily important voice explained to us about how fascism takes root and what it looks like and what it feels like and how to both prepare for it and hopefully prevent it. We are also in probably fortunate to have dalia with us tonight. Dalia is a Senior Editor at slate where she writes two columns. She writes two columns there, one is called, what is it called . I had it in my head a second ago but anyway, she also has a podcast that she is biweekly on amicus and she hopes that it is also written books and one commentary journalism awards and i hope you read her column a few days ago and which really was a wonderful examination and exploration of why the protests of the past week are different in so many ways from the protest of the past few years and maybe that is a hopeful sign. I hope so. Anyway, we are so happy to have these two incredible mines and incredible speakers and people with such humanity and compassion and to help intelligent writers. We hope you can join us in welcoming dalia and masha. Thank you so much. Hello. This is a treat return hi think we been telling masha for years that i felt like i could hear you right in my earbuds all the time. I felt like your voice was the voice in my head that that cant be true and after 2016 after the election i said everything that you said so you have been in my head in this book is fantastic. Congratulations. Thank you. I may be in your head and in your imagination but you are in my head for the moment with your podcast. Its the most illuminating thing there is on this up in court and the law more generally. You. I want to start by asking you one of the things i have alway always you are writing to this idea of door normalize. There will not be a [inaudible] like you right in the book and i know you massively updated the book for the covid era but i dont know you had the chance to update it in the last week for the protest era. I wonder if we could start through this thorny question that i feel like you are a clarion voice for its happening and you are not seeing it. Does anything that has happened in this time since folks have taken to the streets and simply seen a militarized policing in a real resistance to militarized policing make you think that that kind of slow normalization that you are so afraid of might have been arrested in last week or two . I dont know. Actually, no. Im not but i think the protests are amazing and i think they you have written about them beautifully but both the rhetorical reaction in cities and states and the Actual Police reaction makes me think that the things are really, really horrible. A couple things. One is the way that the mayors of minneapolis and new york and im not mentoring all the other people who engaged in this rhetoric but the mayors of minneapolis and new york, two politicians were not only democrats but known as progressive democrats and as far to the left of the Democratic Party but they went to the outside agitator when talking about the protests. Now, the reason that is so dangerous, right, is that i mean, it is this idea and its very strong american little gold culture and i think it has gotten stronger with covid where we see outsiders as these in factors of disease. This idea that certain bodies dont have a right to be in certain places and that you dont have a right to act politically in the place where you are currently located. On the face of it its an insane idea. You act politically where you are and that is the essence of politics. The fact that this is a matter of bipartisan consensus that you can deny or deny people the right to act politically is a priority before talking about whether you agree with the way they are acting politically or disagree but you cut it off at the source and that is really terrible. Of course, then its actionable policing. They are disproportionate ruled response on the part of the police. The willful and i think meaningful flaunting of the Health Guidelines during a pandemic and the gratuitous curfews, it is now a matter of degree. The disagreement between the mayor and the civil progressive mayor of new york and the president of this country who is, calling out fascism. They disagree on the extent to which they stage a military response to these protests. And finally, the last thing that terrifies me is the new york decision to publish tom cottons oped on their oped pages. It marks it as and for those of you who dont know, republican senator tom cotton wrote an oped saying send in the military with the New York Times decision to publish this oped marks it as part of the sphere of legitimate, political conversation. There are a lot of things that the New York Times things are not one of legitimate lyrical conversation and for example, the essay that gave birth to this book called rules for survival [inaudible] that was deemed alarmist by the New York Times. It was not part of legitimate political conversation and the yields for Jason Stanley just tweeted that he has been wrote about called how fascism works and he has been trying to submit bids to the oped page on fascism and they have been turned down. They are seen as marginal to the conversation but this idea that sent in the military to respond to protest is judged to be mainstream in conversation. Im glad you are talking about language and i think it is true that the word fascism, comparison to non theism in the word even authoritarianism and tyranny and all those words that have forced a meaning and we know what they mean and those are words we are not meant to use and at the same time and again this is something you have been saying for a long time that fanciful silly words have come to be in common and words make no sense. One thing even worried about any talk about in the book is this destabilization of language so that fake news goes from being lies in breitbart two things donald trump doesnt like on cnn. I wanted to talk to you and obviously this is been such a concern for me as a legal writer because words have no meaning then law has no meaning and certainly one of the things i have been trying to understand is how you affix meaning to a president who is so slippery with his language but i wanted to talk about some of the words even of the last few weeks, masha, the notion of opening up the cities we will open up and we have all grasped that as though it means only because donald trump used it and i remember for weeks resisting that this might use that elocution of opening up and it doesnt mean what you think it means but and then even more pernicious the last couple of days with antifog getting thrown around to mean something that antifog is emphatically not to and looters is coming to mean protesters and i wonder if there is a way in which we cant use words like fascism we cant use words like tyranny and that is too loaded and troubling for Mainstream Media but we can happily appropriate and start using these words that mean nothing and we are very comfortable with that. I dont know if the ease with which we all just started talking about antifog in the last couple of weeks as though that means what donald trump means it means is part of this trendier thing rhino you say theres this dualism where they turn words into gibberish or their very opposite but i am thinking we are in a quite honestly a rule of law crisis and we are appropriating all this language. He has been incredibly talented at dominating and has recently taken a liking to and dominating the conversation and we saw this in quieter times and we saw how much he managed to shift the conversation on immigration. I write about that in the book that again, the became matter of degree. Terms like deterrent became part of our mainstream language while concentration camp couldnt be a part of the language or was marked as extreme when in fact, its reality unlike [inaudible] which was not. He has been winning the language war. He has certain talents and has certain talents as a performer in the way he uses language and has a real instinct for using or inverting language that has two build with relationships of power. For example, when he uses words like witchhunt or conspiracy and positions himself as the victim and the most powerful man in the world cannot be the victim of a witchhunt. He just cant. But he completely owns that discourse. And then he uses words to mean nothing and that is a real problem for us as citizens and certainly for us as journalists because when a president uses words that mean nothing it still means something. It has consequences. We have to cover it but we cant cover it at face value. And we lose, right . I think there is no right answer here or no way to solve this conundrum. I think of doing journalism in this time is harm reduction. It will still be awful but may be a little bit less awful if we are incredibly intentional and thoughtful in the way that we handle language. One of the things again you have been saying this for three years and its a through line in the book is and this is crushing for an institutionalist like me who relies way too much on [inaudible] but your institutions are not coming and you say again and again americans are almost childlike, masha, in their belief that there are guardrails and they will help us and we have courts and we have, you know, a senate and we have Public Education and we have a free president and all these things will kick into high gear and will get us out of this. Again, its very distressing for someone like me who once believed that courts and journalism would get us through this and you have been pretty consistently correct that those things could be corroded. I wonder if one of my concerns when i sort of downing bourbon at three in the morning, one thing i worry about is that the childlike confidence that the election is going to save us and that i had a friend send me a note to date was like as long as we are standing in lines it will all work out and i thought even that there is a certain amount of the magical thinking about how to extract ourselves from this. Im not nearly as confident as i was six month ago that there will be a free and Fair Election and i guess i would just ahead the coda to the question which is now a threepart question but i would just ahead what to be or how do we note that it wasnt a free or Fair Election if people quote unquote voted and you describe russian elections and you describe that you can have a lot of elections arent elections and i dont know that we are sophisticated enough to distinguish. Thats a huge question. First of all, lets start with the institutions. Actually listening to your podcast and reading but especially listening to your podcast has really helped me think through the conditions that a lot of institutions and i think i remember your podcast about the travel ban. The first travel ban. The ways the mobilization of Civil Society forced action. I think it is something we dont think about often is that institutions are not fixed in a vacuum. We are not working on their own. They are entirely dependent on all these enabling conditions and they are also dependent on the actors that or that act through them. Donald trump is a badfaith actor. The way he treats the courts in the way he treats the law is the way a Real Estate Developer in new york treats city hall and its regulations. He sees it as an obstacle and something to get around. I think and correct me if i am wrong, you know much more about this than i do but i think the American Court system is not designed and im not sure you can make a system that doesnt or that takes into account the possibility of bad faith and continues to function. So when he comes up with a travel ban when the first travel ban was settled in the court and then basically they were written the way that again new york Real Estate Developer would try to get around [inaudible]. You want us to call this alley a or a road so that we have the illusion so whatever, we can call it a road. That is not how courts were designed to function. In the faith that americans have an institutions i would not even call it childlike but call it religious. Predetermined and anomalous. A quantum leap and the electoral system has been for a long time. The marriage of money in politics which has grown in significance over the last couple of decades, so when you ask whether we have free and Fair Elections, when did we have free and Fair Election and what are they . So i am just avoiding bad altogether and what i would ask is there still a chance that we would give the electoral means. Im using this terminology in the buck and ken maybe come back to it later what is the stage where its still reversible. Im assuming for the purpose of the discussion that we are still in the attempt stage so in that sense it is but im actually most worried about a. Now i think this campaign. Talking about the vote by mail option in many jurisdictions that might be the only way people are going to vote as if there is a second wave in november and i think this absolutely devastating preemptive effort bill barr has picked up this week. This kind of creating and constructing in a pandemic is something we have to Pay Attention to. Dont ask one quick question at one harder end of the night. Fullstop. I love how you catch this tendency again in the tendency to assume donald trump is playing. We all think that putin is this devilish puppetmaster controlling everything. He is a lot closer to trump then we think and i think that we brought that out in the today. We thought about Robert Mueller in this way and they really want to believe that someone is in charge of overseeing this and i think that one of them is certainly one of my takeaways from the book we are in church of all the things. With the working theory why there was a tendency to assume that just because somebody has power or is wealthy or is famous, they must be in absolute mastermind. The only thing that is more scary that is driven, that is we are on that bus. We have a deranged lunatic in the drivers seat and i had one very sad and one somewhat happy. I was convinced he was going to join since july and the other, ive written this book in 20 fold it was pretty well reviewed the criticism that a lot of them have is i portrayed through ten as being uneducated basically incompetent and not very smart. You can continue to be president if you are an idiot and i think we like to believe that its not that we like to believe that we basically believe the worst moments in Human History were created by evil genius because they think that we dont hold into them, that we gave agency over to the most emotionally appealing clown, that is demoralizing and awful but that is what happened. Host before i take audience questions, and im going to end before you begin to put them into that little box and not the chatterbox otherwise it is way beyond my capacity. I want to ask you this journalistic question that you talk so much about how we are doing in journalism and paying attention in the wrong ways and racing around and i dont dispute any of that. After charlottesville when the nazis marched in 2017, ive been 11yearold son said heres the thing when they marched through your town. If you Pay Attention to them, they win. If you ignore them and also they win. And ive come to think of that as my mantra for the entire era. As journalists we dont have the option to tune them out. We dont have an option to say they are distracting im going to pretend hes not tweeting. How do you navigate someone that seems to come out and use it at the beginning to commandeer the english language coming and weve all fallen in line. How do we do this covering and paying attention and watching the slow denigration into democracy and the Democratic Institutions without centering this. Is it possible to reduce the harm in any way. By publishing the oped it is clearly contributing to the. Whats really take another clear stance. It is just a very, very difficult large shift to steer and for which there would be actual institutional losses from the foundational values like neutrality. And what they called the call from nowhere. But if when you cover trump in a neutral manner, example the governors disagree which is a step short of earth flat scientists disagree and when you allow for that than you are contributing to the harm. Its much more difficult to be mindful and located in politics while you are covering trump, but thats what we have to do because asking the question how do you not contribute to the harm is locating your self in politics into giving up the neutrality. The id will name the things and bring things into focus in a way that neutral coverage doesnt. Thank you. That helps. I want to ask the audience questions, and theres a bunch. I want to start with john who asks this question i probably should have opened with which is how do you define fascism . I dont use the word fascism in the book. The reason i didnt use the word fascism in the book is because i dont think that its very tight word. Fascism if you look at the dictionary definition its an autocratic system that upholds the supremacy of one race over others and suppresses. That actually describes a lot of places in the world right now. So, i try to avoid using it and the reason it was important is because trumps performance was very poignant. It is fascism. If nothing else if he was possible of grasping the concept probably not. But he has chosen all of the symbols, visual and linguistic fascism. Interesting question. Do you think the left has its own role contributing to the rise to its own form of authoritarian thinking . I dont know what the left in the u. S. Is exactly. Sometimes when we talk about the left, we talk about the Democratic Party. Sometimes we talk about an actual leftist thinker and activist very much marginalized in the american politics and the people that we called left in this country but without anywhere else in the world. Sometimes i take that as a question about the Democratic Party. And i think the Democratic Party is in general is the technocratic idea of politics with a good resume of what makes a good candidate. Getting the votes is a matter of sort of adding up all of the column is in the excel table into which the states the president ial nominee can deliver. Thats mostly the electoral appeal to a and weve been at this for a long time. That is not enough. And we have known that its not enough for a long time. Certainly weve known since 2008 that even a hint of a vision of the future works magic. Obamas message of hope isnt articulated. There was no vision that was offered. It was just a possibility. That was enough to mobilize voters in a way that was complete for the party among others. Then we get somebody like trump who is the opposite kind of politician. He appeals to the past and addresses peoples anxiety by saying ive got to transport you back to the time that it felt safer which is a kind of picture of white racist United States that isnt going to change. Into the Democratic Party completely misses the point of that appeal and basically juxtaposes that. And i think that that is a mistake that the Party Continues to make. The only way to beat trump at the ballot box as anywhere else is to offer the future to counter the position of the imaginary past. Do you have some sense of joe bidens speech yesterday was a version of the or a version of trying to put forth a narrative of empathy. Maybe if i could get an unwillingness to acknowledge the is the constitutional hardball and so so many of the conversations im hearing a in other words it is a myopic view that we can get back to something that isnt necessarily helping to. Those things were fine before trump came along and i hope copes to dislodge that a little bit, but i also think is a fundamental misunderstanding of the politics and policy. Its not the blue slip. It isnt the procedure of getting nominees through. All of those are instruments to politics. Politics is how we live together in a city and state and country. Its what is happening in the streets right now. Spirit here is a question that ive seen twice in the chat in a note of these questions and i know you write about this so powerfully. The hell with this become third when nothing moves them and maybe a good example today is hearing them say trump was threatening to bring the military police into the park but i have to really think about whether i support him. The constant performance you describe in the book its an audience of one, this was brett kavanaugh. But how did you dislodge the . Is another example. There are so many of them in the last few days. I was struck by the defense secretarys comments that he didnt know trump was going to Lafayette Square when he followed him to. This is good to be the secretary defense and he followed the president blindly and didnt ask anything. [inaudible] is the casualness with which they give up the responsibility, accountability, agency. What i write about in the book is the problem where the country has been split into two different realities into the democracy they perform a. I dont mean perform in a statement the actions are addressed to the electorate. They perform for the autocrats and thats what weve seen the Republican Party do over and over again. Probably toomey the most memorable example is the party fallen, but passage of the tax bill. Trumps signal of legislative achievements. Or orrin hatch has been in congress for 250 years. And another senator said thank you for letting us have you as president. It was shocking to me because this language into this kind of posture. It had been a year, 11 months at that point and it turns out these people who used to have the public were so willing to just hand them over completely, so that is my i dont know what to do about that. The only thing that can move at this point is fear. They are the biggest they driven by the fear of being on the wrong side of trump. It means that they would be voted out of office. Theres another apocalyptic question, theres a lot of apocalyptic questions. The sponsors of imagine in november he gets reelected. Looking backward, what is the thing that we did that we should have have done. I dont know if you have insight that about what we should be doing if maybe and maybe i wouy beth to a couple of questions here in that institution so what can we do if we have sort of given up on this decision institutions, where are we left to work . That is a whole another level of separation. I think the work of journalists is to describe what we actually kinsey. I think that if they lose, if trump is reelected because we were not imaginative enough because the democrats didnt nominate a person or people who could carry a vision of the future, who could speak a language of ideals and moral aspiration or maybe they could attend. If there is a way to reverse this autocratic attempt. Host now im going to ask the institution question which is something i think about myself. My impression of the question at what point do you just give up on the court. A broad question that sweeps into all of these institutions, given this historic faith of the thinkinthethinking is always won the system to those that are being crippled by bad faith actors. What is the best way for citizens to actually make a difference . I think we there are so many things we need to do. We need to stop defending the institutions quite so much and stop depending on other people and get involved in politics. For that to happen, we need to have local media. And one of the things that concerns me the most it breaks s my heart the most is that questions of local media which means the crisis of local politics. You cant have politics without actual living, breathing journalists who are right there to witness the politics. You can have journalism without politics but you cant have politics without journalism. So we are in a crisis of local media before the coronavirus and now this Economic Disaster has hit local media in ways that we still have to take him but it is just a catastrophe and we are not going to be able to reconstitute ourselves politically until we find out a way. I can go down the rabbit hole for a very long time but basically we have to stop reading the fear to these corporations that have no incentive to actually facilitate our politics. Theres a couple of questions about social media and about twitter and media bubbles and im going to try to put them all into these two questions. One, i know that right. Pointedly about the use of twitter that the easy version of the question is should the account be suspended . I dont know that the account should be suspended. Im happy that its finally doing something that is put a stop light spotlight on a disastrous situation we have now, which is with some exceptions notably we havent seen politicians really talk about regulating social media. Im afraid of the latest round between trump and twitter set us back in terms of that conversation that has barely been started. What i mean is that social media has to be regulated, but they have been able to convince everybody, and its easy to convince everybody that they should self regulate because of these social networks that are owned by shareholders or in some cases not even shareholders whose only incentive is to make money that they will self regulate in the Public Interest without any accountability. And so then finally we see a little bit of selfregulation and trump responds by making a call and a promise to finally have the federal government regulated in social networks which naturally well call for the counterreaction so weve opened up without having any kind of not only not having thats not being able to possibly have a conversation about the regulated and social coverage. Host so another version of the question, which is what do we do about the fact that media bubbles are so complete and self reinforcing the idea that what is true on the other side is de facto false and i can read all day and know nothing that is true, what do we do about the fact that we have two utterly different realities and not even the language to find all the way back to what you described as the truth. We treated it as a political problem and make up new rules and how we have media and how to fund it publicly and how journalists can report on local politics and position themselves in local politics and those of us that are actually journalists take stock of how we use language and how we can return meaning to our profession. Her here is a question that i wondered myself. What is the symbol of the red wine in the front of the book . I think people see Different Things in the cover. The designer said he sees it as a radical break, and i think you can read it as a brake in time or also between two audiences and realities. For me it has the connotation is a russian expression that runs through something which means something is so. I think that there is a whole bunch of anxious questions. What happens if he loses it refuses to step down, what happens with the elections and violence and rioting on the streets and armed militias. A lot of listeners are just wanting to hear what your view is if we get there into the hypocrisy that you are wanting about. Im not in the business of making these predictions. But i can say is im scared. I think that we are finally starting to realize that no, this isnt a perfectly designed system that would withstand all attempts on its beautiful conception of itself if we fail to maintain it and look after a deeply imperfect system that is the closest thing that we have known to democracy. If we dont look after it, someone could come out of it with a sledgehammer. Its surviving hypocrisy, right, i think there is some part of you that for now it is an open question. I think that any crisis we know that any crisis is a moment of opportunity and we have certainly seen that during the Trump Presidency and during the coronavirus pandemic and in the last few days the ideas that seem marginal become quickly assimilated and that is a huge political possibility. Would we be able to rid write tt into the future, if possible. But that isnt a question to me that is a question to all of us and its not just a question for the them but for right now. What are we doing to make sure that we come out of this in january, 2021. [inaudible] she froze up. I think we lost her. She may be reconnecting. But we all can just go from msnbc and learn more from mashas evening. I had lost the names of the jurisprudence, sorry about that. Also she has a book coming out eventually, lady justice. Thank you, thank you. We turn to you now for many years and a new art a dose of reality and insight that we count on so much. I know you have many workbooks on you and that we will work for years to come. Thank you all for joining us tonight. We had a huge audience. Please purchase the book. You will get a fine book with it you can do that at the link on the bottom of the screen. Its an amazingly important book. You need to read it and get it for other people. We need to get it out there and for now, we just thank you all for joining. Your next event of a good visitt youve been doing all day long. All of you, be well and be well read. Thank you. Thanks, good night. Welcome to csi is online. The way we bring events is change thing that we will still present live analysis and awardwinning media from the ids lab. All on your time live or on demand. This is