M. Gessen

This conversation was recorded on Tuesday evening this week at the Brisbane Powerhouse for the Brisbane Writers' Festival.

In Australia, we're watching the events in the United States from a distance.

You've lived through these moments twice now on two occasions, in Russia, now with the creeping autocracy in the United States.

I just wonder if that's got a kind of a texture to it or a flavor to it.

What does it feel like to be living in a country that's going through this experience where its democratic institutions are slowly being strangled?

You're right that there's a feeling that people talk about, that they feel that the space around them is getting smaller, like the walls are closing in.

What is that space?

What's disappearing here?

You say that Trumpian news has a way of being shocking without being surprising.

What do you mean by that?

Maybe that's why he's so discombobulating, because on the one hand, you have a whole lot of lies coming out of his mouth all the time about absolutely everything under the sun.

But then that's mixed with this extreme candor, this extreme, no, I'm just going to do this.

I'm going to do this thing.

I said I was going to do it, and now I'm going to do it.

Is that what kind of messes with people's heads, that mixture of falsity and extreme candor?

When Russia, after its brief, slightly tepid affair with democracy after the fall of the Soviet Union, slid back into autocracy, I don't think anyone was hugely surprised, anyone who knows anything about Russian history under Stalin, under Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, to see it slide back into its old autocratic habits.

But I think there's still great continuing shock in this country, and perhaps in America too, that the United States of America, the self-proclaimed leader of the free world, is sliding away from democracy towards autocracy.

But are there nonetheless deep roots in American history that kind of explain why a figure like Trump has emerged?

Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses.

Learning to be free.