M. Gessen

There's a moment in the Milan Kundera novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the main character is the doctor called Tomas.

And during the Prague Spring, he writes this essay that's critical of the regime.

And when that all comes to an end, he's brought in before the authorities, and they say, look, everyone, let their heads run away from them, their pens run away from them.

You just need to write this retraction.

I mean, who cares?

It's no big deal.

Just sign the retraction.

We'll put it away, and you can go back to being a doctor.

And he's about to do it and he's thinking about it and then he walks outside of his office and one of his colleagues goes, did you sign it?

You signed it, didn't you?

You signed it, didn't you?

That seems to be the key to this story.

The kind of cynicism that seems to infect the larger society where people want you to sign that document.

What happens to people when they actually perform acts of courage, bravery, compassion, rebellion?

How is that sometimes punished by the other people around them?

I used to think that the iron rule of politics was that a politician would hang on to whatever power they had, no matter what.

But I think one of the major and interesting spectacles of the Trump administration is how willing legislators, how willing members of Congress have been to resign the power that's apportioned to them by the Constitution to approve tariffs, to approve the act of going to war.

What's going on here?

What's that dynamic?

Why are these politicians behaving so, I would think, really uncharacteristically here?