Chapter 1: What does Masha Gessen say about living under autocracy?
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In the early 20th century, there was this anarchist idea about the propaganda of the deed. The propaganda of the deed was that there were these forms of direct action, and many of them violent. Assassinations, bombings. That when you did them, they were so spectacular. Everybody would hear about them. And when everybody heard about them...
There would be copycats by making the impossible possible, by making clear that society did not work how you thought it worked, that the state did not have the power you thought it had. They could rupture society itself and create the possibility of a moment of revolutionary upheaval. I think there is a way in which you should and can understand the Trump administration as operating often
through propaganda of the deed. Now, they're not an anarchist collective. They're a state. They're a regime. But they operate not so often through the dull work of rules and laws and legislation and deliberation, but through spectacle and through the meaning of particular spectacles. Venezuela was a spectacle. They do not seem to have planned for the aftermath.
They were decapitating the Maduro regime, but they left the regime otherwise completely in place. Nobody seems to know, even in the administration, what it means for America to be running Venezuela. But it was an example, an act that showed something.
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Chapter 2: How does the Trump administration utilize spectacle in politics?
All these multilateral institutions were created, all these mechanisms, international courts, the UN, the Security Council, because it was in many ways an aspiration. An aspiration to creating an order that would, A, prevent a new global war, something at which it has been very successful, and B, prevent... the kind of disregard for human life that made the atrocities of World War II possible.
And in that, it's been much less successful. But the aspiration remains. And I think even though the United States was historically one of the parties that violated this order because it had the power to do so, it still did it under the cover of respecting those aspirations.
And what I think has changed with the pullouts from all these different multilateral institutions and the blatant disrespect for them and actually contempt for them that Trump personally and his administration have articulated, and I think it sort of culminated with Venezuela.
If there's an event that I think of as sort of the nail in the coffin of the new international world order, it will be Venezuela.
I guess when you talk about international law here, The history, including recent history, of what it has clearly not been capable of preventing or bounding is pretty long. I mean, Israel and Gaza is ongoing. Russia inside Ukraine is ongoing. There was much about the drone strikes in the Obama administration that was not working through, let's call it, you know, a normal set of due process.
And frankly, Maduro himself said, Which I think is very important to say in all this. He was not a peaceful, humanistic, democratically elected leader. He was a brutal, repressive dictator destroying his political opposition, remaining in power after losing an election.
And so when we talk about there being a tipping point, you know, are we just upset because it is Donald Trump doing it, but he is just revealing the way the world really works and has worked, just stripped of its veneer of bureaucratic opacity?
Well, first of all, the veneer is important. It's important that at least the George W. Bush administration felt it was necessary to lie to the UN rather than disregard the UN altogether. out of respect for the institution. I mean, it sounds ridiculous, right?
But there was a moment after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine when it seemed that actually all these mechanisms that were so painstakingly created and, you know, one step forward, two steps back, that they may all finally kick into gear because there was this unprecedented consensus, at least Western consensus, on Russia's crimes in Ukraine.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of the Venezuelan regime's downfall?
Frankly, it's tiring to look out at combat formations or really any formation and see fat troops. Likewise, it's completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon. and leading commands around the country and the world. It's a bad look. It is bad, and it's not who we are.
He goes on to launch an attack on beards also in that. There is a real obsession with aesthetics across this administration. Who it appoints and then what they want from the people beneath them. What do you make of that?
I mean, it feels so familiar to me. I grew up in the Soviet Union where we watched parades on TV. We... One of the happiest days of my life as a kid was finally receiving the Red Kerchief. What is a Red Kerchief? A Red Kerchief is a sign of membership in the Young Pioneers, which is the kids' communist organization.
And it's amazing because I grew up in a dissident family by the time I was 10 years old, which is when you get inducted. I was quite aware of where we lived and what we thought about it. And yet the aesthetics of it were irresistible because, I mean, it was beautiful and it was also like other people and you could march in formation. And it's so incredibly appealing. Embarrassingly, right?
Chapter 4: How does Gessen relate Trump's actions to historical contexts?
And I just watched, there's this terrific new documentary called Mr. Nobody Against Putin, which was filmed in secret by a teacher in a Russian school in like a small town of 10,000 people in the Urals over the course of a couple of years after the start of the full-scale invasion.
And it's really about sort of the imposition of propaganda in the school and how that school and all other Russian schools became sort of retooled as junior military organizations. But you can also see the imposition of an aesthetic.
These kids start marching in formation, they start carrying the flag, they eventually get these uniforms that harken back to those exact uniforms with the red kerchiefs that I wore 50 years ago. It's, you know, it's a fascist aesthetic. And it's what the 20th century taught us about what power looks like, what strength looks like.
This is something I've become slightly weirdly obsessed with. Why do fascist movements, authoritarian movements, why do they seem to care so much more about aesthetics and, in their own way, beauty than Keir Starmer's government or Joe Biden's government? Even Donald Trump...
Coming into office, and amidst everything else he had to do, deciding to chair the board of the Kennedy Center, as that was clearly the thing he really wanted to do, and then recently having his name etched into the institution, the Trump Kennedy Center, it's now called, if you go to the website, if you go to the building, he immediately signed an executive order about bringing classical architecture back to federal construction.
I do not share Donald Trump's aesthetic. He filled the Oval Office with gold. But he really does have one. And he really understands it as a dimension of politics and power and cultural control. And this goes through other leaders like him. I mean, Putin has, you know, his bare-chested photos and his aesthetic.
And you go back to the mid-century and early 20th century fascists and you see an incredible, you know, I have a whole book on Nazi aesthetics at home. I have come to think it's first a weakness of liberal politics that it does not see itself as having a relationship related to beauty, that it does not believe beauty should be part of politics necessarily. It likes beauty.
It wants other people to do beautiful things. But, you know, we're the people in the suits. who have the charts and can tell you how healthcare system is run, not the people who have views on what is and is not beautiful.
Why do you think it is that these movements see spectacle, see beauty, see aesthetic as so much more central to how politics should operate and how power is wielded than certainly liberal left-wing coalitions do?
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Chapter 5: What role does propaganda play in modern governance?
How often you hear the administration describing citizens, constituents as a domestic enemy within. Political opposition as something, I mean, judges as, you know, I remember the administration describing a judge as a legal insurrectionist, right? The real insurrectionists, the people who's from the Capitol on January 6th, they got pardoned.
But now there's this language that anybody trying to protest, et cetera, the Trump administration is insurrectionist. The enemy needs to be dealt with, you know, at least as the internal logic of this looks, by force. And when that happens, they're not going to investigate or say, this is a great tragedy, we need to see what happened.
They're going to say, you were the enemy and we were right to kill you.
Totalitarian leaders need to wage wars. And sometimes they wage wars externally, more often they wage wars internally or both. And they always designate an enemy within. Trump did it as soon as he assumed office. His main enemy were immigrants and protesters, right? But the number of the enemy within has to expand constantly because that's the only way that you can wage war continuously.
And the war needs to escalate. And that's what we're seeing, right? It was unthinkable until it happened that a white, presumably middle-class protester would be executed on camera in broad daylight in an American city. And now that it's happened, it's the sort of thing that can happen here.
How does all this look similar or different to you from what you saw in Russia?
It's so much faster. And it's so much faster not just in Russia, but in Hungary, in Israel, in any country that I have covered that I think we can say has become... autocratic, it's comparable to the speed at which countries that experienced an actual violent revolution have transformed, that I have studied but not lived through.
But I think that this really is, you know, we can use some of the tools, particularly from the electoral autocracies in Eastern Europe, to understand some of what's happened here. But I don't have any tools for understanding the rate at which this country is being transformed.
Do you think that the rate and the speed of it also reflects a fragility within it? And one way I mean that is very famously Putin has, or at least had, but still has, I believe, very, very high approval ratings. Trump does not. In the 2025 elections, Republicans got routed everywhere they competed. Some of the spectacles we're talking about, I think Venezuela might over time turn into this too.
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Chapter 6: How does the concept of deliberation impact political power?
So these are just two unanswered questions. I've lived most of my life among people who looked to a future and to more powerful political actors to restore kind of justice. I thought I would someday be in The Hague writing about the Putin trial. And I think that the most powerful country in the world unilaterally canceling the moral order is an assault on hope.
I think that's a place to end. Always a final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
So late last year, I spent probably three or four months just reading books about Israel-Palestine, and two of them are standouts. One is called Tomorrow's Yesterday, which I think you've talked about on the podcast.
The authors have been on the show, if people would like to check that one out.
Right. And I'm not just saying it because I wrote a book called The Future's History.
Yeah, Hussein Agha and Rob Malley.
One of the incredible things about that book is just how well written it is. Beautifully. Yeah. I never expected a book written by two people together, but also two policy people to be so beautiful. The other is a book that, after I read it, got the National Book Award, which is One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.
And then I just read a galley of an autofiction novel by a writer named Harriet Clark, and it's called The Hill. And it's a book about a girl who is raised by a mother who is serving a life sentence in prison. And it's just an absolutely extraordinarily beautiful and intelligent novel.
Lasha Gessen, thank you very much.
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